I’ve been sitting in my office thinking, there has been a lot of people jumping into affiliate marketing and find themselves confused and down as to why they can’t earn money from it. First of all, making money online is not just about affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is one of hundreds of ways to earn money online. It’s just a preference. I know a lot of people earning thousands of pesos per day in adsense, paid reviews, paid to click and filling online surveys and more. Affiliate marketing is just one of these ways. No other thing is better or best its just how you decide to focus and grow and be good at what you do.

First thing, if you want to dive in this industry there are things you should check first and evaluate your values if you are really into this industry and if you want to make it big. Though the promise of huge income is present in affiliate marketing, there are also consequences in return for the big prize:

• Affiliate marketing is not for the faint of heart. If you don’t want to spend money, this industry is not for you. You can lose a lot of money in this industry (big money) especially when you’re starting up. The figure below suggests that I must bid Php1,809 per click to show my ads.
• Long Hours Of Work. If you can not devote 16hrs - 24hrs working in front of the computer just to test out a niche for months and find out that it is not profitable, this is not for you. Affiliate marketing is an on going process of testing out everything. You want to know if you’ll earn big bucks in this particular niche? You have to test it for months. There is no guarantee that you can get your money back. Well, that is business. But once you got that particular niche that are doing good, it can give you money for years without doing anything.
• Frustrations. Most of the time, you’ll be dealing with google and their algorithm. Slaps are as natural as any affiliate marketer experience this. Most of the time, you’ll get slapped every week and your site will be black listed. After spending months developing the site, you have to make another one again, and again and again. If you are easily discouraged, affiliate marketing would be hard for you.
• You must be creative. People who are earning big bucks in affiliate marketing are very creative people. They know that everybody is doing this and that and that gives him the motivation to do another thing (might fail or succeed) but its worth the shot. You may lose time and money in the process but its really worth it.
• Tough Competition. If you’re doing adsense sites, you know that competition is fierce when it comes to optimizing current events. You may earn big money for that but because of competition it will diminish. Now multiply that competition by a hundred folds in affiliate marketing. Competition is not really bad. Its also a way to know how much money you can earn in a particular niche by knowing how much competition there is in the niche. Which can save you time in the long run.
• There is no one way to do affiliate marketing. I am guilty of this. When I started out, I sought out mentors that would teach me how to do affiliate marketing. What I learned from each person I asked is that, there is no one way to do affiliate marketing. You just have to know the basics (which you can get for free on the internet) and get out there and do it. Do not be afraid to lose money and fail because everything is a learning experience. Then after that, you will develop your own way.

It has been quiet for a couple of days in this blog because I’m busy learning things more about affiliate marketing. I just found a great resource that can help me improve my campaigns and its not free. I’ll just have to try it out first before blogging it here.

Anyways, I’m also messing around with offline stuff and I was being convinced into joining in an MLM (Multi Level Marketing) business a.k.a. pyramiding. Now, pyramiding is not illegal. Though most of them are. There are still some legit MLM companies out there. But this post is not about how to spot a scam MLM company but about how they sell.

A friend of mine in college experienced being recruited in an MLM company back then and when I told my story to him, he said that the “sales pitch” of these sales agents are all the same. We laughed and talked about it “Pare yan din sinabi saken noon eh, ganyang ganyan yun!”. Taking into account that this friend of mine got recruited 3 -4 years ago. If their not changing the strategy, it only means one thing, its EFFECTIVE! Let’s enumerate their sales pitch strategy a.k.a. marketing strategy that makes MLM companies (and even scam companies) successful.

MLM Sales Tactics

1. Rags to Riches. They will first start the conversation of what’s their situation years ago before they got into their MLM company. They will tell you all the saddest story from being a highschool drop out to a dog died experience. Just to make you feel that they are just an ordinary person like you that have their ups and downs in life. Of course, you will be interested to know that how this guy got to own a BMW if he’s just a high school drop out? On to our next tactic.
2. The Doubts. They will then tell you how they found the company and how hesitant they were at first. They will tell you that they are just like you that are skeptic and don’t want to spend money for the MLM company. They will blurt out the reason, “I have no money”, “I don’t trust the company because it might be a scam”. The sales agent is already putting his self on the customer’s shoes. He knows about the doubts and that builds rapport. This is a very good psychology because the people being persuaded to join might already be in doubt. The sales agent already did the work for them to clarify the doubts by presenting certificates of legitimacy, business permits, pictures of the president of the company shaking hands with a prominent figure.
3. The Hero Shot. This time, the sales agent will brag about WHO are the people already joined the MLM company. They will name names of celebrities, generals, political figures or people that are already rich. This will give the clients an idea of how “exclusive” this company may be.
4. The Opportunity. This is the fun part as most bloggers in the internet do this (me included). Post the earnings. This will give an idea to the client of the earning potential IF they join the MLM company. They will will show you Php100,000 check amount of money earned per day that its funny how we see our eyes got big but not bigger than the amount of money they have. They make it sound so easy by comparing it to a normal day job. They can earn Php100,000 per day and they will point that out compared to a normal day job. They will show you their BMW’s, introduce you to their youngest millionare teenager just to prove to you that its the shit. They will say to you that you are given an opportunity to change your life by joining their MLM company. This is a psychological tactic that makes the client feel in control. Now that the client is in a trance. It’s time for the next part.
5. The Challenge / Call To Action. They will flatter you. Tell you something like this “You, <your name>, you are intelligent, you know how to grab and opportunity when you see one. This is an opportunity that we are giving you, its all yours for the taking…”. This will most likely result to the person joining. Because no matter how hard they think, they will not see any reason why NOT to take it. The business is legit, check. Earning potential is big, check. Make it look easy to earn, check. This is how many people get scammed. They forget the fact that the reason why these agents want you to join is not about helping you. But its about the money.

We can learn a lot from their example as most of these principles are used in internet marketing.

I am not against MLM because I believe that its a really great marketing strategy. A lot of successful businesses started as MLM. It really opens opporunity for small players to do business. But the fact is, it is against my belief in business. Business for me should be for the long term, that even my 8th generation grand child may earn from it. In MLM, there is no way it could survive 10 to 20 years from now. Once the flow of sign ups stopped, the PYRAMID will shatter. And the ones that will get affected are the ones below. It’s not really helping people build a business, but a legitimate way to take someone else’s money.

Harrizon Gevitz is a 16 year old successful affiliate marketer that has a Black Amex Card. What’s a black amex card you say? It’s nothing, you just have to spend $250,000 (11 Million Pesos) per year to get a Black Amex Card. XD

This kid is sick but rich. We noobs have a lot of things to learn to get to where he is now at an early age.

Disclaimer: This is NOT a paid review.

If you guys watched the reality show Top Affiliate Challenge, you must’ve noticed that most of the challengers runs offer on COPEAC despite the fact that you can run any affiliate network in the contest. CJ is one of the biggest affiliate networks out there, why does the challengers used COPEAC?

I gave COPEAC a try and registered. The sign up process is easy, all you have to do is fill up the form with your phone number, they will verify your application automatically. You will receive the verification number on your phone.

1st Reason Why COPEAC Rocks: Account Managers

Once I got accepted, I was greeted by my account manager. He was quite friendly and willing to make money with me. We even set up a goal to make at least $500 where HE will help me make that money in a month. It is quite helpful to talk to your managers as you can learn a lot, especially if your a newbie. It’s like a friend mentor that can help and earn money with you.

2nd Reason Why COPEAC Rocks: FREE Landing Page Design

Ohhh I like this one. Being a web designer, I do love designing web pages. But sometimes, if you are new to a market, you don’t know what should be the design of a page that could attract the target audience. You have to research for it first which takes a lot of time. Luckily, COPEAC have a landing page design service that is free for all affiliates! And I must say that the quality of the designs are top notch (coming from a web designer myself).

It’s also quite helpful for people who don’t have any idea on how to design landing pages!

3rd Reason Why COPEAC Rocks: Rotating Creatives

If you get banners from an advertisers, you are limited to only one design. Since, affiliate marketing is about testing, you want to know which banner design attracts more clicks or conversion. You have to test each and every banner available. This will take time for me if I constantly change the banners. But with COPEAC’s rotating creatives tool, I can automatically rotate the banners and test each and every banners, and of course, track which one is converting.

COPEAC earned my good impression to be one of the leading provider of services that could help affiliate earn more.

You may sign up on COPEAC using the link.

Have you ever experienced having to decide on what keywords to optimize, what products to promote but still, the money isn’t coming in? I have, and through my experiences, I have come to find out that there are 4 factors that should be met, to have a successful campaign in affiliate marketing, blog or any other online business.

Market Research

People are using the internet to find what they need, what they need to know or need to buy. Therefore, it is only logical to think of the search term they enter on search engines as potential market. Like for example, web design is a market and affiliate marketing is another market. And these market may be subdivided into different sub markets like real estate web design, small business web design or web 2.0 web design. If people are entering those keyword terms in the search engine, they want to know about those terms or buy products related to those terms. It only makes sense to know which keywords are used by the market to buy a product or search info about the product.

Searches

Are there people looking for a product or a solution to their problem? If there are, there is opportunity. Like the Law of Supply and demand.

Competition

I used to be afraid of going to competitive market. Simply because I am still noob at this that I look for market that are high in traffic and little to no competition. I have come to find out that this is wrong. The best market out there are those with high competition. Because many people are there, the market can sustain the spending of your competition in advertisement. I am now more afraid to take on no competition market because there must be a reason why no people are in there. Maybe the market isn’t buying.

You can easily do a market research by using google and their tools. One of the best tools out there and is free is google’s keyword tool at google.com/keywords.

Traffic

Bloggers are master of driving traffic to their site. They are good at creating and spreading buzz all over the intarweb. I am always amazed by how good they drive traffic to their site that my server crashes. I’m not mad or anything, just amazed. But with regards to this topic, are we getting the traffic that are related to our market?

There are 3 kinds of traffic

1. The Browser - People that are just passing by. Probably a friend or someone that knows you that want to check out your site from time to time. Maybe they buy, maybe not.
2. The Iffy Traffic - People that are on the edge of buying but still hesitant. They arrive at your site and decided to buy later.
3. Trickle Traffic - These are people that are ready to enter that credit card details. Trickle traffic is sometimes defined as low but laser targetted traffic.

With this in mind, are you getting the best quality traffic from the search engines?

Conversion

So you have a market and you got traffic going to your site and the people visiting your site are the right people. The next question is, are they willing to spend? There is no other way to test the market for conversion rate but to promote something and test it out for a week. Sometimes I will use amazon affiliate to test the market out or pepperjam offers. If someone buy within a month’s time, you know you got a winner market. According to survey, for every 200 visitors you should get 1 sale, this is to know if the market is feasible.

Product

Once you got your market, drove traffic to your site and you know that people in the market are actually buying, its time to find a real product. This can be your own product or services or focus on promoting affiliate product.

As you can see, the 4 factors should be done accordingly. People sometimes jump to the next phase as developing the product first before they promote and drive traffic to the site. Or they drove traffic to their site first before actually knowing if there are people searching for it. The good thing about the internet is that, you can never guess.

So I decided to stop all my 4 campaigns and focused on only 1 campaign that’s making most of the profit. Why? I have limited funds and I might not eat for a long time if I continue with all those campaigns.

I was not sure at first if I should continue this campaign. It is saturated, competitive and the keyword bids are fucking high. I’m talking about $2 - $11 average cost per click. But after asking many affiliates, they said that “If you’re breaking even or losing just a couple of dollars, then you have a winner“. I am making conversions but losing a couple of dollars a day $1-$12 a day. So I guess it is ok, I just need to tweak it more.

Now another issue is about the saturated market. I’m still new to ppc affiliate marketing and having to choose this competitive campaign I’m doing right now, I’m actually not sure if I would hit it big. Back then, when I was using just SEO on competitive niches, I was laughing my way to the bank with untapped, long tail keywords. But things are a little bit different in PPC. Since most affiliates said that I shouldn’t go for it because its saturated, I thought to myself, if many people are there, maybe there’s a lot of money to support those affiliates and their campaigns and the pie keeps getting bigger because more and more people are jumping into it. There is money in saturated market. Think porn. So that got me motivated in going for saturated market.

Well that’s just me, I never listen to advices anyway especially if its negative, we still have to test and risk right? Then we think, analyze and decide.

I’m also planning on buying a new dedicated server. My sites are going down quite frequently with other blogsites aiming for current events traffic and my affiliate sites getting huge traffic from PPC. I’m quite happy actually. Not because my sites are crashing, but because I know its time for expansion. Man, I love this industry.

I have been seeing a lot of people jumping into affiliate marketing. Though it is a lot different from blogging and adsense, it is as profitable. Affiliate marketing is a whole new playing field and in my experience it has been tough for me to think differently, away from adsense.

Change:

http://psdjf.com/ref=sadjsi213l to http://mysite.com/redirect.php

This post is about hiding your affiliate links. Hiding your affiliate links is very important because…

Reasons Why You Should Hide Affiliate Links

• Google hates affiliate links - Google will penalize you for having affiliate links on your page. And these link will also suck up your PR juice from your site. So it is best to hide them.
• People Hates affiliates - It must be a psychological issue. People don’t want somebody making money out of them. And many people wouldn’t sign up on your affiliate link if they don’t know you. If you provide good information though and helpful, they might consider, but most of the time, they don’t.

How To Hide Affiliate Links

There are different kinds of techniques in hiding affiliate links. The most common one is to use tinyurls. There are also iframe technique, where you will load the affiliate site on your website, so visitors will see that you really own the merchant site, with your domain in it. And the other one is the redirect technique.

I’ll be teaching about redirect technique because this seems to be the best that works for me and it is the simplest.

In order for this redirect to work, your server must be able to use .php pages. Let us make our .php page. We will call it redirect.php.

So open your text editor and add these lines of code:

<?php
header(’Location: http://psdjf.com/ref=sadjsi213l‘);
?>

Once you’ve done that, save and then, everytime you want to go to your affiliate link, call upon redirect.php.

So for example, “Buy Now” will have the anchor text and will have the link of <a href =”redirect.php”>.

So instead of seeing http://psdjf.com/ref=sadjsi213l as your link, you’ll see http://mysite.com/redirect.php

which is a lot cleaner and more professional.

That’s all there is to it.

No wonder why most newbies are afraid to do PPC. It will eat your money instantly. And the rate of success and being broke is dependent on how can you tolerate risk and see your money go down the drain.

Earning money is fun. Losing money isn’t. So what happens when someone afraid to take risk in PPC and don’t want to lose money to learn? He will not learn nor succeed. True there is still another option, go SEO. Its free. But, it takes a lot of time to see results. PPC gives you instant results. Though some people say that it is temporary as you can only send traffic as long as you have the money. What they don’t know is that, as long as that money spend on PPC comes back in a form of commission, its still a good source of long term income.

Doing PPC in affiliate marketing is really tricky you need to have data that you can base your decision. Bidding up or down blindly is not what PPC is all about. Being clouded by emotion has no place for PPC affiliate marketing. For example, you are losing $50 a day for a campaign. You still need to get at least 100 clicks to say that it is NOT profitable. But the weak-hearted might stop those campaigns right after the $50 was spent with no return. There are a lot of factors that you can consider why it didn’t become profitable. Maybe sales comes in Monday or week ends or seasonal, maybe your site isn’t converting well, your ads, your ad copy, your title and so on. There are a lot of factors and you need to lose some money at the start to gain data. You can not judge a campaign completely just by saying “I have spent $50 with no sales, so this niche is not profitable”.

PPC affiliate marketing is not for the weak hearted. Better of become an SEO affiliate marketer. Both have their advantages and I believe is a matter of preference. I never said one discipline is better. Just be wary of the consequences in going with any of them.

To sum it up.

SEO is for those who have Patience. PPC is for those who are Aggressive

So I did it. I did it again. After my epic fail on PPC, I once again asked YSM and Adwords for a PPC duel. I was afraid at first to try it one more time for I might lose more money than before. But by reading and telling to myself LIFE = RISK I finally took the bull by the horn. Besides, I have my friends doing it at the same time. If I mess up its gonna be fun. If I did good, its fun to share the techniques.

Basically this is a PPC campaign that’s running for a week now. My first few days were terrible losing about $40 a day. I would like to halt and stop my campaign because I am afraid to lose money.  But since all affiliates that are successful have their fair share of hungry days of no money because of PPC networks sucking it up off their credit cards, I thought to myself, if I want to be like these people, I should starve myself also. LOL. So yeah, instead of halting the campaign, I rose the bids of my keywords! The usual $0.2 keyword bids I rose to $2.0 per click!

I might come of as insane for bidding $2.0 per click. Maybe I am, and so are the rich people doing affiliate marketing. lol. No one knew, except you, my readers (if theres any). So when the 7th day of the campaign arrived (that was July 17th) I was surprised to see my earnings. My profit margin (ROI) was from 50% to 3000% though I have 1 failed campaign (-56%), 5 out of 6 campaign were successful. Insane numbers, I know. The ones that generated the highest ROI are the ones that got most SEO traffic so I wasn’t spending much on clicks.

Btw, when you want to compute for the profit (ROI) use this formula :

( Earnings - Money Spent )
% ROI = ————————— x 100
Money Spent

Basically its just net profit over total expenses. As much as I would like to post the earnings here, I already made a pledge that I won’t. This blog is not about making money online but an affiliate marketing and web design blog.

Pay Per Click is so powerful, fun and very rewarding to learn. I should’ve learned this stuff before I learned SEO, things might have been more different. I am not a guru, I just got my very first “Ah hah!” in PPC, I know there would be a lot more things and problems to come, but I’m ready for it.

Lesson Learned: Don’t be afraid to lose money.

Right now, we should already have a niche topic, an ad network (ex. pepperjam, cj) and a partner. The next step we’re gonna be doing is research. If you missed the previous affiliate marketing rockstar posts, just click on the link.

Building an affiliate website is also like building a house. We need blue print and plans to have a successful site, though not as costly but as important. Take into account your knowledge in web development.

To Do List

• Do you already have the knowledge to build a website? If not, do you have the time to learn?
• Do you have the money to pay for the hosting and domain? If not, get out there and make some money, either by doing some manual work or a job.
• Have you checked competitors’ website? If not, make sure to write down in a piece of paper the strong points of each competitor site and take note of how they promote the products that are the same as yours. This is important to put in detail their strong and weak points so you may combine their strong points and use it in your site and beat them with their weak points.
• Do you know how to promote a website / product? If not, do you have the time to learn? The purpose of this affiliate marketing rockstar is for me to track how I improve my skills in affiliate marketing using PPC. My last campaign in pepperjam as stated here, where I used SEO to drive traffic to my site. SEO is driving organic traffic from search engines that is free and will not cost you a dime if you work yourself. I suggest you research for a technique that will help you in promoting. There are tons of sites out there that teaches SEO for free. I won’t be dealing with that in my post for affiliate marketing rockstar or we will take hundreds of years just talking about it. As from here on, my promotion would be from Pay per click campaigns.

Once you did all that, we are ready to build our site, in which we’ll talk about on my next Affiliate Marketing Rockstar Post.