Holy Crap, I’m an Affiliate Marketer!
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve been toying with affiliate links for years now, but I was never serious before. I guess I had no strategy, no framework. Oh, and I really didn’t have that much traffic either. Traffic helps . 
So for years I’ve struggled with all of this. I was running Adsense for awhile, several years ago. More recently I spent a lot of time doing article marketing, attempting to exchange articles with others for backlinks. It was a lot of work, and the end result was just, well, backlinks! The only real result I could see was that one of my sites dropped from PR4 to PR2, supposedly due to poor quality links. Who knows.
I also spent a lot of money during this time. I joined a group. I purchased various pieces of software. I wish I could say it was money and time well-spent, but I’m still not sure. The resulting traffic has been minimal, the income almost nil. I think I managed to hit $5/month on Google Adsense at one point. That’s it.
The one thing I *did* do right during this period was that I did something. Wait, I know that sounds confusing, but bear with me! Many guberus out there tell you to make money by writing an ebook, and to just ‘fake it to make it’ when it comes to expertise. I’ve seen a lot of these ebooks. I’ve even bought a few. Trust me, there’s no expertise there. But I’ve given myself a good bit of expertise in one area, travel. How did I do it? Easy, I TRAVELED!
Yeah, I know, revolutionary concept, right? You do something, you get the right to help others figure out how to do it. You make the mistakes, you help others avoid them. And while we were traveling we published tons of pictures and dozens of posts along the way. And guess what? Traffic! And credibility — expertise. Funny how that works.
So any way, after the first main leg of our trip was over I began consolidating my many sites, repurposing some of them and rethinking monetization strategies. I decided that I hated article marketing and backlinks for the sake of backlinks. And as I thought back, the one thing I have absolutely made the most money on was affiliate links. Specifically, links that I would occasionally put out there to friends who were looking for a web host. While I no longer use BlueHost myself, I still recommend them, and they pay their affiliates well! (FYI, I now use GlowHost, a very eco-friendly hosting company)
I did some reading and came across some very helpful sites. First, the wonderful Sugar Rae helped me to feel a lot better about Affiliate sales. It’s just business. I guess I had some hangups about this for some reason, but she made it seem all normal. I also listened to podcasts: Affiliate Voices, Affiliate Juice and Affiliate Thing are all very informative.
I ended up settling on social media for publicity and marketing, and affiliate links for monetization. And not just a bunch of boxes in the sidebar either, text links. Yes, text links! Evidently a text link or two in the middle of several paragraphs of lengthy discourse or product review gets a lot more attention than a banner or a box. Who knew?
So today it dawned on me…I now have six domains, and I am slowly filling them with context-appropriate product reviews peppered with affiliate links. Unlike the boxes and banners of the past, the links are getting clicks! I include a healthy dose of tweets and Facebook pages and Google pages, etc. The backlinks are slowly building, the Page Rank isn’t doing so bad either with two sites at PR3. But my main focus is affiliate links.
I’m an Affiliate Marketer!
Saved money the old-fashioned way - working 8-5.
Kinda feel like I'm heading in the right direction now, just took longer than I had thought/hoped.
Thanks for dropping in!
$5 a month with Adsense ?? Lucky You !! Mine started with $2 !! Haha !!
Semi-retired? Wow...I'm getting close to retirement. Adsense is my number money maker right now. Way more than 5 bucks per months. However, it took me 7 years to figure it out.
Thanks for this post...it made my day. Good stuff Glenn.
Paul
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
Like