And there you go, months after months, you see new generations of newbie make money online bloggers claiming to teach you how to make $1,000.00 per month with adsense provided of course you do the work, even if his own adsense account only goes as far as $10 a month. But as the law of evolution and natural selection, these new spawn of make money online bloggers will soon wither away. After 2 to 3 months some of them will realize that making money online is not that easy and focused on their day job instead. After spending a lot of time reading the guru’s advice and buying the guru’s products, he concluded that its not the guru’s or his’ fault but the government, recession or the tsunami in Indonesia.

Others, maybe the 5% of these new blood will realize that money can be made online, only if he tries to do it himself, learn the craft himself, do the tests himself and stop listening to what gurus says. These new blood will shut down their make money online blogs to lie low and descend into the shadows, making money quietly without the noise of the make money online world. “The wise man keeps his own counsel” as our great philosophers might utter.

Building companies, hiring employees, without even featuring on any magazine, TVs or blogs, but they make the money. They are the one that sells you the xray vision cellphone ads you see everywhere. They are the one that says “you won a prize if you click here”. They are the one that pays facebook and turned it into a million dollar company. But you don’t know them.

It is human nature to follow what the majority is doing. It is hard not to. It is our survival instinct that is hard wired to our brains. After all, if you think differently from the crowd during our prehistoric days, you’re as good as dead. You won’t be able to survive out there alone.

This time, thinking differently can reward you greatly. Even millionaire traders and investors have a strategy called “Contrarian Strategy”. Where going against the crowd rewards you millions. Taking advantage of human nature to his own benefits. There are benefits of going with the crowd and going against the crowd. But if we’re going to compare both sides, going against the crowd has more pros. You get to discover yourself, how you react to pressure and situations and you get rewarded for your efforts. Nothing can be more satisfying. After all, everybody wants a little intellectual challenge. Following the crowd is easy… You don’t have to think.

For an intelligent affiliate marketer to start his business. He must first realize what kind of personality he has and what kind of returns he wants to have.

Defensive Affiliate Marketer

Focuses mostly on long term, passive income. Focuses on niche that are hard to penetrate but have a long and lasting traffic that are all year round. Defensive Affiliate Marketers try to utilize every strategy that will get him on top of major search engines. Every link building strategy known to man. He’s a cheap bastard that don’t want to pay for traffic so he works harder to get on top. Defensive Affiliate Marketers are the turtles in a turtle vs bunny race. They don’t make money for the first couple of years, but they are building their base for a better and more stable stream of income later on.

A newbie affiliate marketer may try to make money online using the defensive affiliate marketer’s strategy. Link building here, exchange links there, commenting here, stumbling there. But what separates a newbie from a real affiliate marketer is their attitude. The defensive affiliate marketer knows he’s going to make money online sooner or later so he’s not rushing everything. He knows that he’ll probably reap the rewards of his efforts 2 to 5 years from now. That kind of patience comes from long years of experience and confidence of affiliate marketing that he is willing to risk 2 to 5 years of effort knowing that he/she might not succeed. While the newbie affiliate marketer gave up 3 months after.

Aggressive Affiliate Marketer

Focuses on the short term, active income. The products and campaigns they promote require a lot of attention but gives great return. They may make money, thousands of dollars per day, but they may lose money, thousands of dollars per day as well. They utilize pay per click advertising to their advantage, facebook ads, pay per view ads and any kind of media where they can buy “eyeballs” or traffic.

Aggressive affiliate marketing requires a lot of strong will and heart because it is guaranteed to be stressful as you will lose money sooner or later. What’s important is you make profit even with the losses you take. The aggressive affiliate marketer spends money for advertising, lots of it, in return for high return in very short amount of time. They are the bunny in the turtle vs bunny race.

Variation

The defensive affiliate marketer, in search for a greater return may want to be aggressive at some point. Leveraging the money he earns from his stable websites into a more aggressive advertising. In this case, it is suggested that a defensive investor have 75% of his websites defensive and 25% of his websites aggressive. What I mean by that is, 75% of his websites should already be earning money in a stable way. Without any intervention. In other words, passive income. And devote 25% of his energy to aggressive sites. This way, he is in a safe position in case his venture to the aggressive promotion may not prove to be profitable.

The aggressive affiliate marketer may also want to be defensive. For the benefit of being safe and having a stable stream of income. It is suggested the other way around. Have 25% of your sites having stable income and devote 75% of your time making aggressive campaigns.

I didn’t know about this until I was searching for an affiliate program for an online bookstore that I’ve been using and they are with Google.

A lot of great stores to promote as well. Especially for the Lenten season.

The Media

Freedom of speech is a great right. But sometimes is a big obstacle when it comes to crucial situations. Broadcasting the strategy of the assaulting team live on TV only gives advantage to the hostage taker. Risking the life of the hostages. Broadcasting “surprise attack” live on TV doesn’t seem too convincing, even calling it a “surprise” attack.

Making the hostage taker feel agitated by having the media broadcast the arrest of his relatives is what triggers the barrage. I don’t think the media should be covering it in the first place. Or be so close to the scene in a way that its possible to know what’s happening around the bus.

Police

How many times have you ruined your reputation. From corrupt officers, torturing prisoners to failed hostage rescues. We don’t want to point out what is obvious. Be it lack of equipment, training or strategy, which basically encompasses all of the necessary skills for a successful hostage rescue. But you’re certainly lacking on the “courage” that’s suppose to be embeded on your badge. And even the aim to throw the tear gas in the window.

You tried to make your reputation good. You tried so hard and we can see that. Having exercise programs to cut of that beer belly. Bashing rallyists head with an arnis stick all sounds good to me. But the only way you can 1 up your reputation is in times like this. And you blew it every single time.

If you can’t do it, please have another department do it. On other countries, its their top 5% of the armed forces (military) who do the hostage rescue. Not the police. People who knows how to handle gun fights and not be afraid to get hit.

Men Behind the Scenes

In a hostage crisis, the men giving the command is important. It is crucial not to include politicians in the scene. Politicians only wants to make the public happy and will not be able to “make the call” if the going gets tough. I have never heard a politician make a tough decision to “kill” a grave threat such as a trigger happy maniac. It will be bad for their reputation as being a makaDiyos or makatao. The men behind the scenes should be an experienced military officer or experienced police officer that have a lot of experience in this situation. What the fuck are those politicians doing there?

Contrary to many’s opinion. I think its a good idea that the government didn’t intervene with the situation. And only handed support to the best they can. But! for me, Mr. President’s decision to wait that long after the first death was confirmed is not a good choice. The first sign of death should be enough to put the man down. The driver who escaped already confirmed it. He probably shit his pants trying to escape, do you think he’ll lie? Even if the numbers were wrong, just 1 death is enough to consider this man as a threat.

The Hostage Taker: Rolando Mendoza

He must be depressed to hostage a group of tourists just to get his job back. This only proved your point that you don’t deserve to be in the service. Your ideals or reason for fighting is not even comprehensible. Nor rational. I would understand if you demand that James Yap and Kris Aquino should get together but come on! Trying to kill 25 people and end up killing 8 people to get your job back?

But seriously, whatever your reason is, it doesn’t change the fact that you killed 8 people. I don’t think that there is any reason that could justify the killing of innocent civilians. Your life’s legacy of being one of the Philippines’ finest policemen is just a joke now. You really fucked up big time. You don’t deserve any respect nor pity nor condolences. Think of the kids that will have lifelong nightmares of you. Even your death is unfair for the family of the victims.

To the Hostages

The whole world knows we fucked up. I don’t think there is any word that we can say or should say. Our condolences. We understand prayers and sorry won’t bring the dead back. We’re just hoping that we can be forgiven.

To my Fellow Filipinos

Let us just shut our mouth and stop pointing fingers. We don’t need to state the obvious who and why we failed. The whole world knows. The world was watching. Can we just ask apology to our Chinese brothers and sisters in a humble way? In the most humble way we can? It’s still our fault. Its a nation’s fault. Let us be humble like the Christian God that this country worship and accept our shortcomings.

When I started, I just did what I think I should. I failed, crash, burn and wasted money (a lot) but it got me educated. I do not recommend it. I was a complete mess. So if I want to try to help out the new ones or the interested ones I might be able to help them if I know what questions are in their minds.

Sooooooooo… What are the questions or sticking points you have right now that hinder you to become successful in affiliate marketing. I’ll try to answer it in the comments and if the question is good enough, I’ll explain it in my next posts. Just leave your questions below (yes, on the comment area).

This is my way of giving back.

Have a question about affiliate marketing? Leave your questions below!

This is my mindset when I started. I created 100 sites knowing only less than 20 of them will make money. It is a lot of work and not for the faint of heart, but I like the adrenaline rush and the thrill of not knowing what lies ahead. But it proved to be a profitable venture for me. And in turn taught me a lot.

Keyword Research

First of all, to make an affiliate marketing campaign a success is “Keyword research”. Just because everybody you know targets make money online or pinay scandal, you should join the bandwagon to get some money. That’s not the case. Most of the time, following the crowd will only lead to financial losses. What you’ll do is work harder to keep up with everyone and it will only burn you out. And will stress you even more when you arrive at the end of the month is still not profitable.

Affiliate marketing is not a plug and play business. Its not as easy as you think like creating a paypal account. You need to think. Be a contrarian. Challenge every idea. Think smarter not work harder. Underwork your competition. Why would you want to target a keyword that is known by all? Why would you want to create a site about a subject that is talked by all? To get traffic? Yeah that might work. But before you go ahead and make a site? Can you consider this? Do you want to work harder than your competition or to work less but earn the same as him? You can do so by targetting a less known keyword that will give the same amount of money with less or no work. But of course, qualifying a keyword can tell you different kinds of things such as the quality of traffic which brings me to my next point.

Quality Traffic

You notice how I put “Quality” in it? Getting traffic is easy. Trust me. You can buy a traffic of 10,000 visitors per day for only $15 and there are lots of services like that floating around. But I would choose 100 visitors if it converts 50% of the time compared to 10,000 visitors which converts 0.0002% of the time any day. Traffic is easy to get. But quality traffic isn’t. Just because you can use twitter, facebook and stumbleupon doesn’t mean you’ll gonna get rich tomorrow when you wake up. People who use social networking sites are more tech savvy and in return use them only for fun and not really to open their credit cards and give you money. In other words, most of these social traffic are junk. If you want to be famous, these are great by the way. That is why a list bloggers like them. But for people who wants to make money. Stay away from social media, at least for now.

Also, in terms of SEO. Quality traffic often leads to the kind of keyword you target. Don’t get me wrong, if you have a nice keyword that gets more than a thousand hits a day from search engines, it is a great keyword. After all, if people came from the search engines, most likely they are willing to spend money. What I’m trying to tell is that, most of the time, high traffic keywords are more competitive and needs a lot of work to rank at. So learn to pick keywords that are a little long tail that expresses a need. For example: “restore bad credit score” is better than “bad credit score” as it expresses the need to fix a problem. Then you put up your affiliate site that offers solving bad credit scores.

Landing Pages

Landing page design are the face of your campaigns. If you’re gonna make money in this field, you need to have a nice, at least decent design to compete. If you’re gonna do it yourself and don’t know how to do it, do not be surprise if you’re not making money. At least learn how to design or hire someone with experience to do it. For starters, have at least 2 landing page design so you can test. Then you will try to beat the best converter with a new design until you settle with a conversion rate that is suitable to your taste.

Tracking

Track. Track. Track. The only thing that you should be addictive to is stats. Learn to track your affiliate campaigns. From PPC keywords to organic searches, use tracking software like google analytics, prosper202 and crazy egg (I use them personally). Google analytics offers great conversion tracking for its PPC campaigns while prosper202 offers great tracking for postbacks. Those 2 will give you detailed information such as, what link they clicked, where they come from, how long did they stayed on your site. Information such as these are crucial especially when you are purchasing your traffic such as ppc or ppv.

Split Test & Optimize

Split test is like a branch of tracking. This way, you want to maximize your earning potential from the site. So having 2 designs of the landing page is great to test them with each other. Sometimes you need to edit little things on your landing page to covert better. Landing pages are not the only thing you need to test, you also need to test different offers. Different merchants and different affiliate products. Do not trust cpa networks. Trust no one in fact. Sometimes, the same offer is available to different cpa networks but only one of them converts better. It is because CPA networks (sometimes) shrug money from you. One word to describe is “steal” the affiliate commission from you. Some networks do it aggressively, some conservatively. It is present in all networks you just have to settle for the lesser evil. Don’t trust anyone and test test test.

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“Just do what you love.”

When I started learning affiliate marketing, you will always see the top A list bloggers telling you want to do. Giving you tips in earning money with affiliate marketing. When you read them, it makes sense and answers all your questions. Most of the time, they are complicated and you need to do a little more reading. While you think that you are learning a lot. The most important thing that you forget most of the time is to make it simple. The key in everything is to make it simple. I’m a web designer and making things simple is a lot harder to make things complicated and feature packed.

This industry is like a jungle. A business model with a lot of loop holes. With many people claiming to be experts in the field but can’t put their money where their mouth is. You should be wary. There are lots of people out there. How many blog have you read entitled “How to make money online from a newbie internet marketer/blogger” or something like that. A lot right? That is why, I created my blog after I learned affiliate marketing. I didn’t create it before I began to make money. The thing is, I don’t want people to fail if I fail. I want them to learn.

This is what makes this industry tough. Knowing who to listen to is hard. Knowing who the real person are is hard. Just because a blogger has 25,000 RSS reader doesn’t mean you should listen to him. The more you should be wary. As the real ones out there that treat this like a business is quietly making money and doesn’t need to be politically correct all the times or be a goody two shoes / nice guy to every comment they replied on. Always remember that in any business, its a dog-eat-dog world. A nice person has no place in it. He will be eaten alive. The only one he should be nice to is his customer. REMEMBER THAT!

If you think that a blogger is nice to you. Do you know what it means? You are his customer. You make money for him. I am not claiming ALL BLOGGERS do this. I only meant specifically to make money online niche bloggers. Don’t believe me? How many product reviews has this blogger posted on his site with affiliate links? How many products do you think he really tried and bought? I bet he doesn’t even try most of the products he is promoting. Which means, he doesn’t care if you fail. Again, I’m not saying this for all bloggers out there. That is why I want you to be wary and think before you believe this guy.

The more you learn affiliate marketing, the more you’ll realize who is real and who is fake. If you know someone doing affiliate marketing for full time, you’ll know that they don’t follow those a list bloggers like Rowse or Chow. You don’t need to listen to them to succeed as these people make money from other sites that is not totally related to blogging or make money online. Do you get it now? Why do you need to listen to them how to make money online through blogging when they don’t make money out of their make money online blogs?

If you want to learn affiliate marketing, search this site and follow only a few people who do this for a living.

Learn seo and google’s algorithm with Matt Cutts (google’s software engineer) himself. Learn adsense from adsense’ blog.

Affiliate marketing is an idea. It’s just an idea of making money out of your visitors. The most important thing to learn is SEO, SEM and other promotion methods such as media buying, PPC and PPV. You don’t need to read other bullshit blogs that can waste your time. Though, you may feel intelligent reading those blogs because you learned a lot. What matters is still how can you pay the bills next month.

Till next time. Ciaosuuu~

P.S. in any case, if you know how to write. You can pretend to know what you’re talking about and sell products to your visitors. That’s how A list bloggers and make money online bloggers do it. You can too!

Yesterday, I received 3 cheques from affiliate marketing commissions and 1 check from adsense. Then earlier today, I went to the bank to have it deposited to my account. While I was talking to the teller, a guy adjacent to me peeked at the cheques while the teller was messing around with the watermark on the google check. “Astig daw ung watermark, itapat lang daw sa ilaw” lol. This guy was amazed about how google pays me. He only knew that google was only a search engine.

When I was about to go out of the bank he yelled “May online business ka?”. I humbly replied “yes”. He seems to be interested in making money online. But he only heard about people making money with google adsense but to meet one personally must be exciting for him. He knows about the A list bloggers. Here and abroad. But you know me. I don’t listen to A list bloggers to make money online. Bloggers don’t make money online. Internet marketers do. If he were a cute girl, I might have asked her out for a coffee at the nearby mall and tell her what I know about internet marketing. But no, he was a guy. So I was immediately thinking of way to escape any “ambush interview” and “teach me how tos”.

He began asking “Do you know, (this guy) or (that guy) because I went to his seminar”. I said to him immediately that I don’t believe what they are teaching. Especially if one is claiming to be a blogger and earns a living for it. To my book, and my experience, it just doesn’t work. I’m an internet marketer and I don’t know how bloggers earn money (if they earn). I stick to what I know.

I love businesses. Big or small. Passive or active. White hat or black hat. If it will make money, I’m all ears. Just when I thought that all of those questions about how I do business online was just about to suck some “trade secrets” from me. I realized, when he gave me a business card, he’s a real estate investor. That’s a rare occasion. So I immediately flip the script and I’m the one asking questions now.

For weeks now, I’ve been thinking of venturing to another field. Real estate and trading. I never imagine that thinking about it constantly will lead me to actually knowing someone who does it for a living. What’s funny about is that we are of the same age.

We’ll, I’ll leave it at that for now.

One of the most popular way to make money online is email marketing and lots of lots of internet marketers will tell you to “BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF THE LIST”. “The List” is your email list and they will testify, again and again that building your email list will give you the power to “print money” at will anytime you like.

I also have friends that keep telling me that to make a successful product launches, they sometimes make deals with marketers that have huge list. They will go over the extra effort just to get that list or their product be included in the mailing list as promotion.

Autoresponder programs vary from autoresponse messages set- up within an email program to a script that runs on a server. This script may run a web-based autoresponder system that utilizes a web page form or it may run with a pop email account on a server.

In this post, we will list the top email autoresponders today and also give some comments about their service. These are the email autoresponders that I have used personally and anything that is not included in the list, please comment below.

Best Email Autoresponders

Lets enumerate my favorite auto responders of all time.

Aweber Email Autoresponders

Probably the most popular email autoresponders to date and personally my favorite. They have an easy to use interface that makes automated broadcast a breeze. Also, you can start email marketing for just $1. How cool is that?

Aweber has been in the industry since 1998! So your worries of your list disappearing is not gonna happen. Because of good service and excellent script I think aweber is here to stay.

How To Create Aweber Account for Only $1

Click here to sign up for aweber account. You can get it for just $1 then follow the instruction below.

Step 1: Visit aweber site through the link to get the  $1 promo and click on the Sign Up for $1 button.

Step 2: Get the confirmation about the $1 aweber price and some more options if you like. Just pick the first option which is 1 Month Recurring for the cheapest option.

Step 3: Fill up your information.

After your successful account creation, there are also some videos on how to use aweber account as well as how to do effective email marketing and some tips and guides on how to build your list.

GetResponse Email Autoresponders

The name is as catchy as it looks.

How To Create GetResponse Account

Getresponse’s account creation is pretty straightforward and easy. But the downside is that, they don’t offer any promotion or discount like that of Aweber. You pay full price $18 right off the bat.

That’s it for now for email autoresponders and email marketing. I’ll probably create a tutorial about email marketing on the following post. Have fun and good luck!