Today I want to share some thoughts from what I´ve learned about affiliate marketing so far. This article won´t be any in-detail story on how to do marketing the right way, it´s only here to give you some insight in how to start marketing and what is involved in doing it. I´m neither an expert in this field, nor am I making a living from affiliate marketing, I´ve only done some research the past days and I want to share my knowledge with you. (Warning - Long article ahead!)

What´s affiliate marketing?

So, you´ve probably heard of affiliate marketing and what is involved with it? No? No problem, let me give you a short description.

Affiliate marketing is basically all about promoting products and services from different vendors to get some commissions on leads and sales. Let´s take shoes for example (don´t ask me why I´ve taken shoes here…). Say there is a company selling shoes. Let´s also assume that you have a website dealing about shoes, cheap shoes, small shoes, big shoes… So, affiliate marketing would be if you promote the vendor´s shoes at your own shoe website, when one of your visitors buys a shoe through some links you provide on your page, you´ll get a commission from that sale.

That´s it. You make money from referring people to services and/or products. You get a commission from sales. Or you get your money from leads, where people don´t have to buy anything, but only have to join a site or fill out a form for example.

How to start?

In order to start marketing those products and services yourself, you have to follow some basic rules, and I really mean BASIC because affiliate marketing is such a huge field with dozens of strategies, tricks, best practices and so on. I´ve simply put together some thoughts that will help you in getting your feet wet in affiliate marketing.

1. Choose the right (niche) market

In order to establish an affiliate business, the first thing you´ll have to do is to find the right market you want to promote. There are millions of different products and services out there, so it may be very difficult to join the right ones. The best way to find your market is to look at your own hobbies and what you personally like. If you´re an expert in search engine optimization (SEO), choose the SEO or webmaster category. If you like gardening for example, choose to promote garden products. The possibilities are endless.

A good way to find markets is to have a look at eBay for example, there you have different categories to choose from. Simply keep on clicking through the products directory and you´ll probably find a market that fits your needs. You can also take a look at the Google shopping directory to find more ideas on choosing the right market.

It´s really important that you choose a niche market! Find products that aren´t as well-known as mainstream products. For example, don´t choose “computers” for examples, but try to find a niche like “gaming laptops” or “desktop computer accessories”. If you choose a niche market, you´ll have better chances on making sales, because you have less competition from other people also doing affiliate marketing.

2. Find the best affiliate programs

After you´ve found the right product/service you want to promote, the next step would be to find the right affiliate program for the market you have choosen. You have different options on this. First you could go directly to the products/services websites and find out if they have an affiliate program. The most big companies have one, simply do some research for yourself.

The second option would be to join an affiliate network which brings advertisers (the guys that´ll pay you) and publishers (that´s you) together. They usually provide many advertisers (products/services) you can choose from. They also offer different advertising tools like banners or text links that you can integrate in your blog or website to promote a product or service. The best things is, they also manage the payments, so you don´t have to open dozens of different accounts, but only one where all your earnings come in. Some good affiliate programs to start with would be Pepperjamnetwork, Commission Junction or NeverBlueAds.

3. Find the right keywords

The next step involved in starting your affiliate business is to choose the right keywords. In order to promote a product or service you have to either have a website or you´ll need good keywords for starting some advertising campaigns. If you have a website for example, you would place those keywords in your content or as meta tags within your html code. So with both ways you need good keywords to actually bring visitors to your affiliate links or banners.

Here comes the “niche” thing again. I´ve told you to choose a niche market to promote, and the same goes for keywors you choose. To minimize competion with other people´s websites or ad campaigns you have to choose niche keywords. It makes a huge difference in advertising campaigns for examples, mainstream keywords may cost you some dollars per click, where niche keywords may cost you only some cents each click.

A good way to find keywords and new keyword combinations is the free Wordtracker keyword tool for example. Simply start with one simple keyword and find out different combinations that were actually searched on different search engines. The keyword tools also shows you the search volume from the last day, so you can find out if there´s a need for a product or service. Also check out the Google Adwords tool, you´ll find many extra infos there.

4. Start a website or PPC campaigns

After you´ve done your research on finding the right niche market, you´ve choosen the right affiliate program or network, and you´ve have established a good keyword base to work with, you have to either start a website (if you haven´t already) or an advertising campaign, where you´ll promote your affiliate links.

If you have a website, the next step would be to write good search engine friendly content around the market you´ve choosen. To stay by the shoes example at the beginning of this post, you could write about how shoes are made, all the different kind of shoes, materials, pricing…The more and better content you´ll have, the more likely it is that your site gets found via search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN. Remember to include your niche keywords within your text and html code!

If you would like to start an advertising campaign, you have to do some more research on the actual competition you´ll face. The higher the competition, the higher the bidding prices for advertising. For example, it doesn´t make sense to buy an ad campaign with $1.00 for each click, when you´ll get only an average of $0.50 per click through a visitor. Think about it. You may buy 1,000 clicks for $1.00 each, which is $1,000. With an average click through rate (CTR) of 2% and a commision of $25 for each click, you would get only $500 back and lose 500 bucks (so, it´s just an example).

Conclusion

The above article should only give a short insight in the affiliate marketing basics. It´s neither complete nor 100% correct. Feel free to do some research on your favorite search engine or check out this nice listing with affiliate marketing resources. Also check out Wickedfire, a nice forum to find ideas or infos on affiliate marketing.

All in all, affiliate marketing can bring you thousands of dollars each month by “only” referring people to products or services. It´s usually a lot of hard work involved, starting from keyword and market research to building and maintaining a website. But, if you really stay with your goals, you can definitely make it. Start simple, for example set your goal for making only $1 each day, if all works good, try to grow your business.

I hope to provide you with more in-detail information later on as I personally try to start some affiliate marketing by myself. So far I hope this article will help you to get the basics

Bye bye,
Querblogger

WARNING: Paid.vg turned out to be a scam site. Please don’t join this site, the following post is only left here to show you how easy it is to get scammed…unfortunately.

After many days I just checked back on my Paid.vg account to see how my stats were going. I first had to provide a new payment ID (like Bux.to they have also migrated from Paypal to Alertpay), but nothing special so far.

But then I went to my account statistics and was completely amazed. My earnings are nearing the $10 minimum payout limit, I currently have around $8.00 in my account. That kept me wondering, because I haven´t clicked that many ads lately. So I took a closer look and recognized that I had 4 referrals, which brought me over $6.00 within the last weeks! Thank you for all that “heavy” clicking

So I´m only 2 dollars away from requesting my first payment from Paid.vg, let´s see if they really pay. Also I don´t like Alertpay as a payment option (I can´t withdraw money directly to my bank account), I´m still looking forward to receive that payment soon, at least I can use it to buy more referrals on Bux.to (my best money maker so far) or even at Paid.vg!

Regards,
Querblogger

After joining PayPerPlay and waiting for the new statistics, I´m now happy to announce my first earnings from NetAudioAds. It´s not much for the moment, but it looks promising.

PayPerPlay has promised to start serving audio ads on February 1st and in fact they did it, but most people didn´t recognize it because the statistics system was down. It seems they had faced some database problems and bugs in the counting algorithms, but now most of these problems are gone. So today, PayPerPlay started to serve the first 100,000 audio ads randomly distributed around all member´s websites. They try to start in phases to test the stability of their servers, this may take some weeks now before they go full throttle (consider the huge amount of daily ads they are trying to play, it´s millions over millions each day).

I was lucky and my blog received 3 of those 100,000 audio ads. Also my referrals websites (I´ve refered two people) got some ads. Now for your excitement, I made $0.02 (don´t stop reading now, they are still in beta!). Not much I know, but considering that only 15 ads were played, this looks very promising. At the moment I´ve generated 3,339 pageviews, if everytime an ad had been played, I would now have $4.45 (for around one month). Easy money if you ask me, you don´t have to do very much to earn this, only generate pageviews to your website and blog.

I hope the statistics system stabilizes within the next days and weeks and the NetAudioAds team starts serving more daily ads. For now I can only say it looks promising as a nice extra money maker with very low effort. Feel free to join NetAudioAds and start serving audio ads today (if you are within those lucke 100,000 each day).

Bye bye,
Querblogger

Warning! Before you read any further please note that Ucash.in seems to be a scam as reported by many of my fellow commentors here on TMME. It’s probably a good idea NOT to join Ucash.in right now until I can provide you with further details!

Some days ago I´ve written about Ucash.in, a new online service to monetize your links. Only one day after that post I got my first two referrals. The last days I´ve done some free advertising for getting some more referrals to this really nice service. Now I have already 5 people referred to Ucash.in and I hope there will come some more.

So let me tell you in short what I´ve done to advertise my Ucash.in referral link. The first service I used is a really good traffic exchange program called MagnifyTraffic.com. You surf other peoples websites and get a bonus, starting by 0.34 credits, for each site you visit. The credits you´ve earned can be used to promote your own site. The good thing about MagnifyTraffic (and the name suggests it already) is, that you can magnify your traffic rate. The more you click on others sites, the more bonuses you´ll get and therefore the more credits. Yesterday I was in a rush and clicked 500 links (yes I know I´m crazy). I started with 0.34 credits for each click, after some bonuses I got nearly one credit for each of my clicks.

The second service I used was AdsFlip. Some days ago I got a mail from iWebTool, they advertised this new advertising platform and offered me 1,000 advertising credits for joining them. So, I joined them and used my credits for advertising my referral link. The good thing is, everyday I´ll earn some new credits while showing an advertising banner on my blog (you may have seen it in my “sponsors” section). Btw, a nice service with targeted advertising possibilities, maybe I´ll write about them in more detail later on.

I hope I can refer some more people. At the moment I make only $0.01 per day from all the clicks generated on the monetized links. To get even more exposure to my referral links I created a new wiki about Ucash.in, you can find it at the OneEuroWiki!

Ciao,
Querblogger

The fourth month is already ower now and it seems the time is running. Many things happend in January and I can proudly say, I´ve never earned more since I started TMME. So let me tell you more about the dirty little details

Technical Statistics

After being a bit lazy with writing in December, I wrote 20 new articles the last month. Sure, many well-known bloggers write that amount within a week, but I´m no Problogger yet I´ve also seen a return of this “investment”, I got a steady stream of search engine traffic to my blog. Content is king, this is the first rule any SEO expert will tell you, and it seems to be true.

My statcounter statistics showed me 967 unique visitors with 1282 pageviews, that´s an average of 31 unique visitors each day. I noticed a good portion of traffic from the Philippines with around 7%, I´m so international, hehe

I´m still having a Google PageRank of zero, seems they have forgotten me after the last PageRank upgrade at the beginning of this year. My Alexa rankings dropped to 597,415 points.

Earnings Statistics

Now for the best part of this report, my earnings. In December I made around $22, in November I made even less, only $13. But in January I made $40, so far the highest amount I´ve earned within the last four month. I´m really happy. Let me tell you where those earnings came from.

The biggest money maker I´ve added to my money list was PayPerPost which made me $20 alone for writing my first sponsored post. So far I haven´t written a second sponsored post, because I´m looking for the right ones that fits within my money making niche.

Another good income source really worth to mention was Bux.to. After buying my first 15 referrals (see here, here and here) from them, I broke even with my investments only around 2 weeks after my purchase. Now I´m in the profits with around $1.00 to $1.50 per day. The net profit from Bux.to was $9.16 and it keeps running. I also felt is was time for a second investment, some days ago I upgraded my membership to a premium account, not only for faster payments, but also for showing proof if Bux.to is legit or not.

There were also some changes on Subvert and Profit, the third best money maker. They recently changed their payouts from $0.50 to $1.00 per story you digg or “thumbs up” via StumbleUpon. I made $4.90 in January, $4.00 from my activity and the rest from my 10 referrals. Thank you my friends!

There were also some new additions the last month. The first thing was joining NetAudioAds, the company that wants to revolutionize the advertising market with audio ads. I´ve written about them earlier and they are about going live at these moments. So far I have´t made any money because those audio ads are still not playing. According to their last blog post, they´ll do a soft start and start playing audio ads in different phases. It could take some weeks before they really going full steam.

The second addition was Ucash.in, an newly started online service from the founders of Flixya that turns your links into cash. See my article about Ucash.in for more details and why you should join them now! I´ve already made $0.11 within the last days of January.

Conclusion and Outlook

The last month was a really good one. You can see, that my earnings increased and many new money making opportunities showed up. I´m really excited in seeing those audio ads start playing within the next week, seems like a good money maker.

At the moment I´m also trying to learn more about niche marketing. I´ve joined Commission Junction, a big affiliate program with many advertisers waiting for the hungry marketer. Currently I´m trying to become a member of the US-based eBay affiliate program. I´ve written some mails already, but they don´t accepted me as a meber yet. I´ve also read some great articles and ebooks about people seriously making $100 within one day! With hard work everything is possible

Two month are left for my experiment and it seems I will reach my goal. I only have to earn 8$ to get a total of $100. Seems it´s time for buying a domain name, hehe…

Thanks to all my readers, friends and everybody who helped me in reaching these goals. Expect to see more articles and big updates about different money makers this month!

With the very best regards,
Querblogger