In this short guide, i am going to tell you a little about my experiences in affiliate marketing. I dont have the big house and sports car to show you, as i am not there yet. However i do make a comfortable living working the hours that suit me from my own home. There is no boss to answer to anymore. After 12 years as a wage slave, i earned my freedom. It took a lot of time and dedication, but it was worth it. So this is not so much a rags to riches story, this is a story about how to find the information and help you need to make a real success of your online business. If you are determined and have a few key skills you will succeed. You need to be able to set goals to achieve each day. Lots of little goals add up to big things. Get used to writing things down, and prepare for information overload! I just want to give you an overview of what is possible and you can take the elements that suit you to earn yourself some extra money and possibly open your eyes to new possibilities.
There is so much to say but i want to keep this short, so 15 minutes from now after you finished reading, you are able to immediately ready to start to act to earn your freedom.
Income Stream 1 - Affiliate Marketing
Lets get right in there. Here is my clickbank account statement after 2 weeks of being in their system.
Not a bad start?!
How was this achieved? You can see nothing happened for the first few days until i started marketing it. I made those results by selling similiar products to which i already to the same target market i had captured (via an opt-in mailing list). You need to know your target market and their spending patterns, along with where they are in the product cycle. You need to be able to select the top selling products as well. You need to go to your wealthy affiliate account to help you select the top product, as they have a better clickbank tool than clickbank itself.
While the figures are nowhere near as impressive as many i have seen, they are my
first week, and with a
limited target audience! Getting the picture?
A key part of this is building newsletter lists. These are all opt-in and i highly recommend using
aweber to manage all aspects of managing your newsletter, from creating the signup form script, to providing follow up emails and email broadcast functionality. This list is really your key revenue creator. If you can get people into the site via SEO, you can create repeat sales opportunities. If i send a newsletter to 100 people and make $200, what would a list of 50,000 get me? $100,000! Does it seem fantastical? I assure you it is not.
An good example is on
wealthy affiliate, over the course of a year, one member has built a business earning him 59kUS per month! This site is really a great resource. Apart from the information provided, which is great, you also get free hosting for 3 domains! That covers the $30 monthly fee right there!
These two resources get you a long way there, in terms of choosing a niche and monetizing it.
Many SEO methods, more than i can begin to cover here. Some of the methods that are not obvious are creating Youtube videos, and google gadgets. When creating Videos, using youtube to host and deal with all the conversion issues. If the video is taken from screen capture, you can create the videos using camtasia studio (link at the end of this article).
Income Stream 2 - Site Building
A lot of people are looking for instant businesses they can pick up. Look at all the ebay ads for them, there are hundreds. I have been there and bought content off ebay, only to be punished by googles duplicate content filter. Not smart. Lets focus on building your own site here.
Well, there are a variety of ways to create functional sites in mere hours..
Joomla is a fantastic CMS system, that companies like godaddy will install for you when you purchase hosting from them. I built
mt4 indicators out of it in a few hours on godaddy. Ok ive done nothing with it since, but its there, and ready to rock. You can even have others come along and write the content for you. Also the list of extensions (forums, shopping carts, templates) is vast, and installation is just a case of selecting the zip file.
WordPress is a fantastic blogging package, perfect for fine tuning everything about your blog. Also there is a Wordpress output module with the self growing websites software, so this makes a natural starting point when creating a content-driven site.
When looking for good domain names, the only tip i will suggest, is look for names with '-' between the words. Just like i didnt do with (mt4indicators.com) (should be mt4-indicators.com). This is because google is able to the include the domain name in its ranking engine and it will increase your sites subject credibility.
Also, we discussed wealthy affiliate earlier, and now free hosting now with wealthy affilaite for 3 domains, along with a package called siterubix which is a site building tool. It doesnt get much easier than this. Ive always been a code sites from scratch guy, but i think those days are gone forever now.
Here is a twist on generating content that you probably dont know. You can have the site content
automatically update itself, using self-growing-websites technology. This pulls relevant content from article directories and RSS Feeds, along with your own content, and gradually adds it to your site in an organic way, so it looks to the search engines that it was a human, not a script that created this. How cool is that?!
You can use google analytics or a free stats package (webalizer, awstats) to track it all and gmail to keep track of your emails
Im my eyes, you do need a site and web presence to be able to leverage everything you need, whether you are an ebay seller or affiliate marketeer - your site/articles are your assets in the web.
Along with your site, build a useful service. Give people a good reason to visit. You can then have subscribers, paying you monthly. Maybe you can coach people at something, or create an alerts service. Focus on what you are good at and enjoy doing. then hire a programmer and make a good tool for it - a centrepiece for your site.
An interesting way to draw attention is to write a google gadget for it. If you go to www.google.com/ig, you can create yourself a personalised home page, and add components from different sites. If you search for forex, you will see my gadget at no.2! Check out the image below.
The gadget itself looks like this
Now, what does this create in terms of referrals? Well if you realise easyforexdata.com is not even a public website, it just serves out content for various services, then all these views are serving the google gadget. You can see from the stats its generating about 5000 unique visitors a month. Thats unique, targeted visitors! This has become my no.1 referral source for a key site.
Look at all the hits below, this is because the item is refreshing itself. This is a pretty good starting point for traffic and creating referrals for other sites.
I hope thats been enough to whet your appetite and give you some new ideas for site building. Feel free to drop me a line if you want to discuss anything.
Income Stream 3 - Automated Forex Trading
Forex trading offer lucrative opportunities to make money. Rather than repeat everything said elsewhere i urge you to check out our
EA page, and use our free EA trial at the end to discover more.
Thankyou for reading this article. I hope you do follow through to build your own online business. Feel free to contact me if you can see opportunites to us to leverage each others skills. Otherwise, see you on clickbank!
