Make Affiliate Money
How I Make Money Online!

I often see this question raised by newbies on a number of forums so I thought I would carry out a quick review of my stats and revenue from my portfolio of about 50 websites.  The findings were more dramatic than I thought.

Since January 2009 (when I properly started to use TIDs to track where sales came from) my sales have come from:

Review Sites with a number of products on offer:  81%

Product Name Review Landing Pages (i.e. forexboomerangreview.com) : 4%

Blog Review of a product: 2%

PPC Campaign either direct to Sales Page or via lander: 13%

The truth of it is, that of the 50+ sites I own, the majority of sales come from about 5 review sites, ranging from forex robots, paid surveys, wow leveling guides.

I hope this gives some insight into what works for me.

JZ

If you have a spare $2.3million to spend on a new home and you want to live in Highland Park, Illinois you could buy a piece of Architectural History but more importantly the house used in the Film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” to store the Ferrari.

If you have never seen the film, then shame on you, no seriously it is a must see.  In the film Ferris and his buddies “borrow” Cameron’s Dad’s priceless Ferrari, pictured left and go into Chicago for a day out.

When they return they realise that his Dad will notice the additional milage on his pride and joy, they come up with a “genius” idea to put the car up on blocks and run the car in reverse to turn the milometer backwards!  Unfortunately the car falls off the blocks and reverses through the window of this spectacular glass pavilion into a ravine.

This 4 bedroom, 4 bathroom house is for sale here…

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/370-Beech-Street_Highland-Park_IL_60035_1109385563

more pics

I was watching the BBC News this evening and there was a report on people who have either been forced to or chosen to take on a second job/income to beat the recession.  Instead of the regular view of second incomes, like bar work, shelf stacking or similar evening activities the report was all about people making money on the internet.  The report mentioned a phrase I had never heard of before calling people making a second income after working a day job, FIVE-TO-NINERS.  I naturally went and bought www.five-to-nine.co.uk with the intention of creating a separate site to this blog giving a wider range of ideas for those wanting to earn a second living either online or offline.

The second part of the news article referred to a website called peopleperhour.com which is a site putting

“freelancers” in touch with a variety of jobs/projects placed by “employers”.  How it works is shown here http://www.peopleperhour.com/howitworks.php

Right now there are

BBC Article - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8067449.stm

On my web travels I came across this great FREE screenshot tool which is an add on for Firefox.

It makes it so much easier to capture whatever is on your screen.  The clickbank screenshot in the previous post was created in seconds.  I have also used it to get screengrabs of my website traffic stats which is great when selling some of the sites I will be putting up for sale shortly.

I don’t know how I managed without it!  There is also a Pro version which has an affiliate program, so you can promote and make 25%.

Fireshot Firefox Add-on

Unfortunately my latest account which i have had for about six weeks, since 27th March, has run dry.

Same consistent number of targetted hops, like clockwork, but sales dried up and many of the people on DigitalPoint and Nichechoppers have also been hit this week.  Check out the stats for the last three periods.

12th May to 17th May

433 hops, 1 sale = $82

6th May to 11th May

488 hops, 7 sales = $383

30th April to 5th May

484 hops, 6 sales = $368

Overall stats for the last 6 weeks are:

Sales: 45

Refund %: 17.78%

Net Income: $2057.46

Anyway, time to change all the hops again as I believe this account has been blackballed by Clickbank due to the refunds, like previous accounts.  Onwards and upwards hopefully.

There once was a time when you had to pay for the site which would create Adsense looking text adverts displaying Clickbank products, now Clickbank offer this for FREE.  They call it Clickbank HopAd Builder.

If you are a Clickbank affiliate you will probably seen this advert for the HopAd Builder on the right of the account page.  Note the new colour scheme (nasty red and yellow) that Clickbank introduced today.

There are two options, create text adverts (look like Adsense) or create tabbed Adbox with options for different keywords.  I am not keen on this idea as it is asking too much of the visitor to select which adverts they want to see.  I am therefore going to focus on the text ads.

Unlike Adsense which automatically searches the site content and displays adverts relating to the keywords found in the content, the CB HopAd Builder relies on you inserting a keyword.  You add the keyword, your CB ID, an optional Tracking Code (TID) as shown below, note that it shows you example ads on the right hand side, make sure you refresh to check the right sort of ads for your keyword are showing, you might want to try a few options because “ppc” might not be the best keyword, “adwords” might be better.

Like Adsense set up, the next options relate to the size of the adbox, the text size and color scheme, the one difference is the option to set “target” which means you won’t lose the visitor to the new site, your site/blog will remain open.  As before, the size and style of the box is a bit of trial and error, don’t worry if you don’t get it right as everything is editable html later on.

The next step allows you to copy and paste the html code for inserting into your website or blog.  The HTML can be edited, Clickbank has a complete guide for that here -  https://www.clickbank.com/hopfeed_guide_popup.html

Below is an example of the text HopAd Builder box with adverts relating to the keyword “ppc”

I recently found that one of the Forex products I was promoting had suddenly stopped selling the product and instead replaced the Sales Page with an email opt-in page. The Automated Forex Grail was a Forex Expert Advisor which I started promoting late, but still made over $300 in commission until last week.  then the Publisher decided to rip off the hundreds (if not thousands) of affiliates who continued to unwittingly send hops to this site so that he could collect email addresses to exploit later without having to pay clickbank or affiliates commission.

I reported to Clickbank immediately and got this response!

Can you please provide me with more detail as to how you feel the vendor is stripping affiliate commissions? We take these matters very seriously.”

Isn’t it obvious?  Anyway, I explained what I said above about the publisher being able to contact potential customers direct and sell direct.  I then got this response…

“They will be removed from the Marketplace this evening.

Thank you, ”

And they have been removed from the marketplace and hops don’t work, you get this message..

“The target url was invalid. Please contact the publisher to get it fixed.”

So no notification to affiliates, no warning to change your hoplinks, to start promoting something else.  There is a flaw in this process.  All I can suggest is that you regularly check the sales pages for the products you are promoting and if you find anything suspicious let Clickbank know, they will take some action.

I got off lightly, only spent a little bit of money on ppc sending clicks, but one unlucky guy spent $1000 on www.automatedforexgrail.com two days before based on past commission it had made (this was an affiliate site not the official one).  He contacted me asking what he should do, but he is bummed.

I must add that most publishers are legit, some really bad apples get greedy, you just need to keep an eye out for them.

JZ

Firstly, sorry for the lack of posts over the past few weeks. Things have been pretty mad in my offline world. The company I work for announced a redundancy program in late March and my job was at risk. Luckily I was not chosen to be made redundant this time, but two of my close colleagues were made redundant last week.

This wake up call has really made me think about what I am doing, the kind of commitments I have, both financially and emotionally. When you are faced with the possibility of losing a very good steady income you begin to think about what you are spending and what you could do without. It also made me think about the income I make online and how crucial it might be if the worst did happen. It also gave me comfort to know that I would have a way of making money, and in theory could make much more online if I had the time.

In a perverse way I was actually kind of excited about being thrown out of my comfort zone and being forced to make a go of it on my own, both with online efforts and other consultancy options (there are simply no jobs right now). I even bought a great domain name for a company and investigated the possibility of creating a limited company and checked out the cost of things like Professional Indemnity Insurance. Unless forced to or without the guarantee of income, most of us will not leap into the unknown and leave our comfort zones, the commitments we have are so great.

So back to Affiliate Marketing!

In the last three weeks I have switched CB accounts again. The last account had a period of no sales for 5 days and I created a new account, surprise surprise, instant sales! This new account has now made me $1000 in the past 17 days averaging 1 sale per day and $55 per sale.

Today I banked a check for $722 from the previous account so this account switching is definately working for me. As I have said before, I cannot be sure that those sales would not have come if I had kept the hops to the old account, but I am not willing to take the risk.

There has also been a Google update since the last post and that has again brought mixed fortunes, some sites have increased PR such as this blog and some dropped, most have increased in traffic and SERPs which is what is important, would rather be No1 for my chosen keywords than PR5! Both would be nice!

I have also been doing a bit of domaining. I bought a site in December for $25 and sold in March for $35. Now that is not a great profit, but it was due a renewal so would have started to cost me money. I also did nothing with it between buying and selling and it made me no money. It was a product name domain and that product is being offloaded by the owner so I thought it best to get rid. At the end of the day, if you can make 40% profit for doing nothing then lets do it more and more!

I am going to sell off a few other sites which are doing nothing and will start to cost me in renewals, this should raise a few $$ for PPC or to buy other sites.

Finally, I have bought fxter.com which will eventually be a Forex Blog for all things Forex, not just Forex Robots which is what most of my sites are based around. I hope to use this blog to create an opt-in list and be able to jump on big product launches etc much quicker and easier than I do currently. Also we the number of forex related sites, backlinks to this blog should be good for SERPs and traffic.

Hopefully it won’t be as long before my next post.

James

Now my Wife will tell you that there is one thing that makes me go all soppy and that is Big Cats, mainly Tigers and Lions.  This video has apparently been all over YouTube, but I’ve only just spotted it.

Ladies and Gentlemen I give you the story of Christian the Lion…….