What can make your affiliate marketing successful? Contrary to popular belief traffic = money, it depends. And traffic is just only about 60% of the total formula to make your affiliate marketing campaign a success. Always remember that 80 - 20 rule. In any business, there is 80% chance to fail and 20% chance to succeed. Its also true in affiliate marketing. Out of 100 campaign that you might crank up will only lead to 20% of them making profit. But what good about this is eventhough you did not profit on the remaining 80, all the profits from the 20 campaigns is enough to cover your loses and will prove profitable.

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.

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.

When it comes to making money online, there are lots of people that can tell you how and why. But most of the time, people who says that “this is the real way” is most of the time just bragging, wanted to be noticed or just a link bait or selling you something. How you perceive a genuine knowledge of a person is up to you. I am not a psychiatrist.

If you are a beginner, I’m sure you have read a lot of blogs that tells you this niche is good or this way of making money is good and its a no brainer. Maybe, having a brain is just what you need to succeed. You don’t need someone to tell you that its a no brainer because, you have a brain.

There is nothing out there that can help you make your first buck online. You only need yourself and common sense.

Number 1 RULE: Do What You Like Best

In choosing a niche to make money on, always consider what you want, like or interest. Don’t be influenced by other people because you think its hot right now. I say these things because, I know myself for being lazy… And if I create a site or a niche that I don’t like, I’m sure that the site will die in just a week and I’ll be lazy to post more articles or promote this site to keep it making money.

I’m sure you’ve felt that feeling that if you don’t like something, it feels like hell. Something like going to work early in the morning that you don’t really like. Not a good feeling right?

Even if your site topic is about “snails having sex” and not much buzz around it, keep it going… As long as you like the topic, do not stop… There will be time that your efforts will pay off.

Fine Line Between Doing What You Like & Learning To Improve

There is a fine line between doing just the thing you want and nothing else. Allot a time to “LEARN” things that will supplement what you are doing.

Do Not Listen To Anyone

Do not listen to anyone who says to do this things or that thing to make more money. In fact, don’t listen to what is written in this site. Test your ideas first before going for others’ opinion. Opinions are worth crap. Opinions doesn’t run businesses.

Find Time To Improve Your Skill Set

Many people I know becomes successful, they work and work and improve their quality of work in terms of time finishing the job. But the free time they have, they allot to less important things like playing. I mean, if you have a free time from work, wouldn’t it be beneficial to learn something new that can help you finish your work in lesser time? I’m sure you’ll be playing after work anyway… Or learn something related that will help you earn more.

Money and time is sometimes proportional. If you’re a web designer, wouldn’t it be great if you could learn more things relating to web design like coding html 5, jquery or ajax? You can leave php behind because its for developers but it wouldn’t hurt to learn that as well. The next thing you know, you know everything. That even if you lose all your possessions right now, you’ll still be able to earn money with just what you know.

Strong Mind & Emotion

Being an affiliate marketer is a business in itself. You mess up, its yours to blame. You lost money, no one will sympathize with you or give you a fucking hug. You made a mistake, get up and move on. That’s what I like in having a business, it separates a man from boy. At work, you might get the help of your colleagues to work things out, if you fail, its your employers time and money that is at risk. You’ll still gonna get paid at the end of the month.

In having a business, I was surprised by the emotional rollercoaster. One day you’re earning very good and you wanted the whole world to know. It’s like Megan Fox just stripped naked in front of you. And some days, you feel like shit because you’re losing too much money like Manny Pacquiao just punched you in the groin. Either way, its a fun journey. Just be prepared for the ups and downs. Especially the downs.