I’m quite excited to know that affiliate marketing is making its ground in the Philippines. A lot of people now are into affiliate marketing. Bloggers beginning to discover this income potential and there are a lot of opportunities for people who wants to work at home. But aside from all its benefits, there are still things you need to know and be wary of. Things that stole 2 years of learning from me because of this tough industry.

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!

I’m no guru. I don’t have any talent at teaching. I sometimes don’t know how to explain things that are too simple. I walk around town in my tsinelas worth Php15.00 and my favorite shirt na bigay lang lahat. My cellphone is a nokia 3210 and I seldom use it. To make things short, I’m the guy that you might think that’s a bum (tambay) when you see me. But I actually run an online business. I love to say my job is an assassin for hire. That is when a person asks and I immediately know that they won’t understand the meaning of online business even if you explain it to them. So I just play around.

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.

Mastery is knowing the basics and doing it better than most people. I am here to share what I learned during my 2 years of experience in affiliate marketing. When I started, I didn’t have any mentors to teach me and if you are an avid reader of this blog, you will know about my failures in this industry. But now, I am confident enough to tell you how I do things.

I do not guarantee that this will work for you. But I guarantee that what I am about to share worked for me and if you put enough effort into it, I know you’ll be successful as well. This is the basics of affiliate marketing and all the things you need to know how to successfully make an affiliate site will be talked about in detail here.

2 Things You Need To Know

There are 2 things that you need to know how to have a successful affiliate web site that can earn residual income (a.k.a. passive income).

Keywords & Landing Pages

I will explain both in detail.

Keywords Tell Stories

Keywords are indicators. They are also the basis of your market research. Knowing what keywords to go for will depend either you’ll be one day free from your day job or just enough to pay the hosting bills. Contrary to popular belief, not all keywords are created equal. Not all high traffic keywords are equal.

There are keywords that will get you traffic and money for a short period of time. Also known as current events. And there are keywords that will give you security and earns you money for years and years to come. This is the keywords that we will be targetting. Current events are good and I heard many people earns a lot from it. But I’m a lazy guy… I want to work once and get paid for years. This is what we call in business terms, leverage.

Leverage is using your time, money and energy once to build a site (or portfolio of site) that will earn money. Leave it after it is done and create another site and do it again. This will compound and you will have a vast number of sites earning you money PASSIVELY.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. Focus on keywords that will bring you money for the long term. Sometimes being lazy is good right? ^_^

How To Pick The Right Keywords

Choose Your Tools

There are literally millions of ways to go about this. But lets do this one by one. First, you need something that can gather keywords and their statistics. The tool I use is keyword elite. Its expensive but I just think of it as a business investment. And by the way, I will also list a free keyword tool and probably one of the best out there.

• Google Keywords Tool

Now that you have a keyword tool. Fire it up and try to get a few keyword ideas for the niche you are going for…

Choosing A Niche

In choosing a niche, pick the one that interests you. If I may warn you, if you’re new to this, stay away from “make money online” niche or keywords.

What Keywords to Pick

It is hard to explain how. I’ll just give you an example:

Short Tail Keyword :
Widgets

Long-Tail Keyword :
Blue Widgets

Uber Long-Tail Keyword :
Cheap Blue Widgets

Short-Tail Keyword :
Bags

Long-Tail Keyword :
Chanel Women’s Bags

Uber Long-Tail Keyword :
Cheap Chanel Women’s Bags

What Does This Means?

It means, focus your effort in building a site around the long -tail keywords or the uber long tail keywords. The more specific the keyword, the more people are willing to spend money. These keywords already told you that there is a demand in this “SPECIFIC” product.

Landing Pages

Landing pages affects conversion. Landing pages is the other half of the formula. You got the people into your site using the keywords you have and now you need to excite the visitors to buy. You already know that they are looking for something based on the keyword. You just need a little push to make them buy.

There many types of landing pages and works for different niches. What I want to share to you is one type of landing page that is one of the most effective.

When we first try to look for web hosting reviews on our very first internet adventure. Haven’t you noticed many sites that compare and review different web hosts?

This is one of the most effective landing page to date and is called review sites or comparison sites.

Developing A Landing Page

I am a web designer so it wasn’t hard for me to create a page from scratch. But I also want to think of the people who do not know how to create a web site. For review site landing pages, you can go to sites that sells review site templates. Personally, on a designer’s perspective the templates they have there are top notch and you won’t find anything close to that today.

And of course, not many people have the money to outsource the design and development of your landing page. That’s why buying a review site template is a good choice.

Just change the dummy texts and affiliate links to it and you’re ready to go.

Amazon Affiliate Program

Before I forgot, I am also an amazon affiliate and i do promote things from amazon especially books, since I love to read. There is a script called reviewazon that will let you create a review site in wordpress. Visit their site for more info.

I do use that script for some of my sites as recommended by a fellow marketer / friend. And they do make the job simple in adding products and reviews. Most of all, it runs in wordpress so all the nifty things you like about wordpress is still usable like seo plugins and social media plugins.

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