Make Affiliate Money

As I said early on I started making money online via eBay selling ebooks, but I was very much small scale. If you’ve ever read an article about eBay, you will have seen the kinds of incomes people make – it isn’t unusual to hear of people making thousands of dollars per month on eBay.

Next time you’re on eBay, take a look at how many PowerSellers there are: you’ll find quite a few. Now consider that every single one of one of them must be making at least $1,000 per month, as that’s eBay’s requirement for becoming a PowerSeller. Silver PowerSellers make at least $3,000 each month, while Gold PowerSellers make more than $10,000, and the Platinum level is $25,000. The top ranking is Titanium PowerSeller, and to qualify you must make at least $150,000 in sales every month!

The fact that these people exist gives you come idea of the income possibilities here. Most of them never set out to even set up a business on eBay – they simply started selling a few things, and then kept going. There are plenty of people whose full-time job is selling things on eBay, and some of them have been doing it for years now. Can you imagine that? Once they’ve bought the stock, everything else is pretty much pure profit for these people – they don’t need to pay for any business premises, staff, or anything else. There are multi-million pound businesses making less in actual profit than eBay PowerSellers do.

Even if you don’t want to quit your job and really go for it, you can still use eBay to make a significant second income. You can pack up orders during the week and take them down to the post office for delivery each Saturday. There are few other things you could be doing with your spare time that have anywhere near that kind of earning potential.

What’s more, eBay doesn’t care who you are, where you live, or what you look like: some PowerSellers are very old, or very young. Some live out in the middle of nowhere where selling on eBay is one of the few alternatives to farming or being very poor. eBay tears down the barriers to earning that the real world constantly puts up. There’s no job interview and no commuting involved – if you can post things, you can do it.

Put it this way: if you know where to get something reasonably cheaply that you could sell, then you can sell it on eBay – and since you can always get discounts for bulk at wholesale, that’s not exactly difficult. Buy a job lot of something in-demand cheaply, sell it on eBay, and you’re making money already, with no set-up costs.

If you want to dip your toe in the water before you commit to actually buying anything, then you can just sell things that you’ve got lying around in the house. Search through that cupboard of stuff you never use, and you’ll probably find you’ve got a few hundred dollars’ worth of stuff lying around in there! This is the power of eBay: there is always someone who wants what you’re selling, whatever it might be, and since they’ve come looking for you, you don’t even need to do anything to get them to buy it.

It really is a low start up opportunity, give it a try. P.S. I have over 1400 positive feedback now!

JZ

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There are many Internet Myths about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and in particular how to rank well in Google searches for popular keyword search terms.

A whole industry around SEO has developed from SEO Companies who work on a massive scale on behalf of large corporations, to SEO Gurus on the Web to Google Employees like Matt Cutts.

Until now Google have been fairly quiet officially about SEO and instead insisting that webmasters and webdesigners create sites for the visitors not for the Google Robots.  But on the 13th November 2008 they released their Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide as a sort of “SEO for Dummies” ebook.  It was originally intended as an internal guide for Google Employees, but they have just released it via the “Webmaster” section of Google.  The Link above and in the sidebar will take you directly to the pdf to download.

When I first started reading it, I thought that I knew it all, but towards the end there were several (still basic) things that I had never heard of.  I recommend everyone reads it as even if you think you know it all, it never hurts to get a refresher from the horses mouth.

Let me know if you learnt anything, drop me a comment.

JZ

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Not sure if this is a well known technique or not for searching for good available domain names, but I have just started using Google’s Adwords Tool in conjunction with godaddy’s bulk domain tool.

If you are looking for a keyword rich domain in a particular niche you can simply search for the keywords on the Adwords Tool, this will give you lots of variations and tell you how many times they were searched for. You can download the list of results into a .txt file.

You then copy the list of keywords from the .txt file and paste into the godaddy bulk domain tool. Don’t worry about spaces as godaddy bunches up the words.

You can select which TLD (top level domain) you want to search for i.e. .com .net .org or .co.uk etc (you can select more than one but I would search for .com, then .net then .org etc but it depends what you want the domain for.)

Godaddy will then tell you which keyword domains are available. I was surprised how many keyword rich domains were still available in quite a competitive niche. One .com was available that had over 50,000 monthly searches.

I have found that sites with good keywords domains, particularly .com domains naturally rank well and with a bit of good SEO and backlinks can get very high in the Search Engine Results.

If anyone has any questions about this, please drop me a comment.

James

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In response to a rather lengthy comment from Katherine Robinson here I decided that it would be a good idea to start an “Affiliate Marketing for Dummies” resource on this blog and I thought the quickest and easiest way to start was to add an A to Z guide which would cover some of the basics and acronyms used in AM.

The A to Z is on it’s own page and can be accessed from anywhere on the blog (see button above) or can be found at Affiliate Marketing A to Z

I have also added a standard Privacy Page at Katherine’s request, just so you all know if you want to post a comment on ANY blog you will have to give your email address it’s just the way it works, I would never share your email address or details with anyone.

As you can see, I respond to suggestions or comments, please keep them coming.

James

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I’ve been messing about with web design for about a year now, using Dreamweaver as my weapon of choice. To be honest a lot of the websites I have developed have been based on the Dreamweaver Templates and CSS. And all of them have been html based. Any wizzy bits have been javascript and the only php mysql has been limited to pommo.org autoresponder.

About two months ago I was stuck with one of my sites, I wanted to add an element which was based on the current date, ie display several dates that were 3-35 days prior to the current date. I asked the question over at nichechoppers forum and some very helpful guys gave me the full code but in php. I explained I had no idea about php. “Just add the code to the webpage and rename the file .php” Surely it can’t be that easy! It is.

I fully intend to learn about php code (a book is on the Xmas List!), but have done OK with just copying and pasting code and playing with it for now. It has been trial and error, but I have just added a fairly complex bit of code to a finance domain I have www.creditfor.co.uk It was a free script that I simply cut and paste which is a Mortgage Calculator. I then modified it for £ instead of $ which was fairly simple, but then got a bit carried away and added some simple expressions to show the monthly interest only as well as the capital repayment. Playing about with this really has given me a better appreciation about how php works on a basic level.

I am told there is a good website out there for php tutorials and help called tizag.com but I am old school and prefer to read a book, so roll on Christmas.

Get stuck in guys and try it out.

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I have had a few questions from affiliates via other forums and I figured they might be questions others also need answers to.

I would like to offer assistance where I can so if anyone else has any affiliate related questions, please post a comment and if I can I will update this with an answer.

1) I like the way you setup your sites with a frame. Can you show me how to do that as well? Would save me a bunch of research, I can possibly help you out with something sometime, i’d owe you one, let me know, thanks. (This was about my site http://www.paidsurveysreviewed.com )

It’s not a frame its a CSS, it is a standard template in Dreamweaver.

P.S. Never use frames, the search engines don’t like them, the robots can’t follow.

2) you said you use pommo.org for mailing. i want to put the opt in boxes on my blogger blogs and when people sign up they recieve an automated email and then maybe another one 72 hours later, just to push the product that little bit more if they’re not sure to buy at the time and want to recieve some info.

i know with aweber you can do all this but having had a go on the pommo trial site i couldn’t see if there was this option?

do you just send out emails whenever you feel like it to people who have opted in and they get them at the point when they sign up, like they don’t get the back log of emails you’ve sent out?

Pommo is pretty basic really.

The subscriber submits their details and then is sent an email (which you can modify) asking them to confirm the email address is real. When they confirm this they are redirected to a “thank you page” which can be a web address of your choice, even the hoplink if you want.

Once you have the list of subscribers, you can send out mailings to them, I don’t think this can be done automatically, I have just done it as and when I want to.

3) Have you ever tried using an “image src” cookie drop? They are virtually invisible and appear to be working with the testing I have done. No url shows up or anything. You can even send them directly to the site URL. As long as they visit your page, it drops the cookie undetected. Just wondering and if you have any thoughts on it.

That is called cookie stuffing and is on the black hat side of the fence, if I understand it correctly.

Something I have never done and I don’t think it is considered good practice (in some cases I think it is banned by some affiliate networks).

Do a Google search on it.

I can’t really understand why you need to do this.

As I said, if you’ve got a question, write it as a comment and I will try and help out….

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Some of you may have noticed a change to the Blog layout and look last week.

I was using a wordpress.com free blog called makeaffiliatemoney.wordpress.com to start with and then realised while it was good for SEO and ranking, it was very limited in terms of design and flexibility.

I downloaded the wordpress.org kit and loaded it up to my host and transferred over the posts and comments from the old blog.  this really is very easy if anyone is thinking of doing it.

I then visited UniqueBlogDesigns.com who created blog designs for the likes of Shoemoney and John Chow.  I had a look around and found that they offer this MMO Theme for free which includes all the features I need, including a rotating ad feature which is common on Money Making Blogs.

I really like the “out of the box” look, it is very Web 2.0 and I would recommend it to anyone.  I will consider a unique logo/header, but it serves my purposes just fine.  It is fully customisable and I will add a few more widgets to allow you all a better experience.

James

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A quick note tonight as I am still really tired after the long weekend and Weddings!

I had to make a few changes to a couple of my websites tonight as I had noticed some had been dropped by Google completely, I don’t mean just slipped a few pages, I mean not indexed.

One of them is The Forex Brotherhood which was riding high for “forex brotherhood” terms. It was a holding page and list builder during the pre-launch period and the end of August. Then I decided to redirect it with a hoplink to the Forexbrotherhood.com site, so when someone clicks on theforexbrotherhood.com it goes to the official site. I did this using a php redirect script on the index page.

This worked fine for a while and the site still ranked well for my keywords for several weeks giving me lots of hops and a few sales.

Then suddenly Google updated and the robots then found nothing, no meta tags, no content, no keywords etc etc. All of the links I have built obviously still remain, but they mean nothing if google finds nothing on the site. DOH!

I have reverted to a landing page with some keyword rich content and a list builder. Lets hope Google finds it again quickly and I can get back to where I want to be on the SERPS.

So my tip is, do not use php redirect on the index page if you want it to rank in Google, if you just want to use it as a direct link for ezine or adwords etc then fine, but I want search engine traffic too.

This might not be news to a lot of experienced marketers, but if one of you learns something then I am happy enough.

JZ

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I have just returned from a 4 day road trip to attend two different Weddings. Two very close friends from two completely different parts of my history decided to get married within two days of each other. One friend who I went to High School with and one friend who I went to University with.

Being away from my computers, the internet and Affiliate Marketing was quite good for me. I have been working hard recently, not just on my busy day job, but every evening and weekend on my various sites and projects. It was good to remind myself that I do have a life, I have some great friends who I should speak to and see much more often than I currently do.

I have also spent some quality time with my lovely wife which I have really enjoyed, we celebrated our 5 months as a married couple over the weekend and attending other peoples Weddings reminded us of how fantastic ours was.

I will get back to writing about Making Money very soon, but I wanted to remind everyone that they have lives outside of the Internet and this life is so very important. It seems silly to need a reminder, but I think I needed this weekend away to remind me.

James

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Whatever you think of DigitalPoint Forums with it’s constant spamming, newbies who can’t be bothered to do their own research, the lack of moderation (particularly in the Clickbank Section) and the bonkers “trigger happy” moderators who seem to ban people for no reason, it is very good for one thing, BACKLINKS.

Signature links are a valuable commodity on DigitalPoint and other forums which have the “do-follow” setting activated. They can provide direct traffic from people drawn by the Anchor Text, but more importantly for me they are links respected by Google that improve the Search Engine Results Position or SERPS.

There is an almost daily debate on DigitalPoint about whether forum signature links are good or bad and whether too many too quickly can damage your rep with Google. All I can tell you is that they have always been great for me, I have had sig links on my own profile ever since I could and more recently I have bought links from medium level posters.

I do believe the theory that too many links, too quickly can actually go against a site so I have not looked to buy from high post count members. I focus on buying at least 6 months from members with between 1000-2000 posts and who are averaging 5-10 posts a day. I have actually made what I consider to be good deals, I bought one link for 12 months from someone with 1800 posts for just $40 and this week I bought 3 links and an avatar from the same person for 12 months for just $12! They only have 400 posts at the moment, but that is still more than I have!

I verify all my sites with Google’s Webmaster Tools as this is the only way I am aware of that gives you the accurate number of links Google has trawled and one of my Forex sites is currently showing over 2500 links, almost all of them from digitalpoint. I assume if they were worthless then they wouldn’t list them!

There are risks involved with relying on either your own or another member’s sig links. The biggest threat is that you or the person you bought from gets banned by dp, when you are banned, even temporarily, then your signature is removed and therefore your links are not displayed and picked up by search engines.

You also have the risk that someone you bought links from could remove the links, especially if they got a better offer from someone else, this should not happen if they worry about their reputation or “itrader”, but I keep checking back to see that the people I bought from don’t remove the links. You must check that the links are correct and that they haven’t just put up your anchor text with their link.

The best way to protect against this sort of thing is to check their history, check their itrader and reputation. You will also get a feel for them by sending a PM to discuss the possible trade.

DigitalPoint have various rules about sig links, I have quoted them here for convenience, in case you are not aware of how they work and the minimum requirements to have one.

Our system has automatic signature guideline enforcement. Currently the restrictions are:

Up to 250 characters
No more than 3 lines
No more than 4 links
Images are not allowed
Adult links are not allowed
Signatures and live links within posts are not available to users until they have been a member at least 7 days, have positive (green) reputation and have at least 10 posts.

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