A taste of success

Well, I'm not gonna lie...I've been too busy to work on my affiliate sales lately. It's been on the back burner and learning that Google AdWords banned me for not providing enough unique content didn't help. I was pretty discouraged about that and hadn't checked out my progress in awhile.

To my surprise I made my first sale! I'm not sure how or if the sale was driven from Google AdWords before I was banned, but it has given me motivation to start paying attention again. Ideally I would like to get back on Adwords, but that's going to take a lot of work and refactoring of the website.

I've read that it takes many affiliates a year to make their first sale, so I don't want to get too excited. My traffic flow is obviously limited without targeted advertising so I'll have to get creative. Back at it!

Share A Sale

I thought you might like to know where I'm getting all of my merchants from. I'm using www.shareasale.com as my primary source of affiliate partners.

They offer a huge selection of merchants to choose from separated into categories such as:

• Art/Music/Photography


• Business


• Automotive


• Clothing


• Gifts


• Home and Gardening


• Travel


• and many others

Currently, there are almost 3500 different merchants to choose from and that number is growing daily. They track your sales using referral links that you post. Once you get someone to click your link there's a tracking cookie embedded into their browser that will allow you to get a sale usually 30-60 days after they clicked it.

The great thing about that is you don't have to worry about making the sale during their first visit. This is perfect for a niche that is marketing more expensive products. Most people won't impulse buy on big purchases, so the cookies give them time to think about it and if they come back and buy, you still get credit.

Their payments are prompt and it's easy to track your progress. They have live statistics on your clicks and sales conversion rates for each retailer you're affiliated with. Their minimum payout is $50 and they send payments on the 20th day of each month if you've met that goal.

I'm pleased with their service and the huge selection of merchants. Instead of selling random products like at ClickBank, I can instead market a retailer and the quality products they have to offer. I tend to sign up for a merchant or two a week and many of the programs are approved instantly.

I don't like waiting several days for a response from retailers and Share a Sale often eliminates this need. I'm still waiting on my ever elusive first sale, but I feel good about the content I'm putting out.

Also remember if you're a retailer and you're having a difficult time getting your products to sell and traffic to your website, check out the merchant program they offer. You set the commission amount and let others market your products and services for you. This will save you money for low costs and hopefully take your business to the next level. Good luck.

Write Write Write

I've been writing a lot lately. I've not only been writing reviews for the affiliates that I'm associated with, but I've also been writing articles to promote my niche, home decor.

I truly believe writing is the key to success in affiliate marketing. It's critical to build relationships with the people you are selling to. You have to let them know that you're a regular person that's trying to help them out by giving them something they need.

Writing will also help you get your link out to more sites. The more sites you are linked to, the higher your potential traffic will be.

I got my article about buying home decor online and saving money published at Ezine Articles. I'm going to try and write another article this weekend if I have time.

Writing articles is a great way to get links back to your site and promote your area of expertise. I've gone ahead and submitted the article I've already written to a few other services, but so far I haven't heard back anything yet.

I'm still churning away at Facebook marketing, but so far I still have no sales as a result of it. I'm going to carefully monitor it this weekend and then I'll decide if it's worth it or not. My feeling is that people might be clicking the links by mistake and that's costing me.

I think money with Google advertising would be better spent, but I'll let you know what I find. Enjoy the weekend!

To Google and Beyond...!

Lately, I've been working diligently to get quality content onto my site affiliate marketing site. Last night I decided to submit it to Google with the hope that it would list it in their directory someday.

I woke up this morning and tried a Google search and to my surprise the site was listed! Given, it's not a top ranked site and the search words have to be quite specific, but it's better than nothing.

I thought it would be much more difficult to get listed. I checked Yahoo! and Bing later on and so far I'm not listed on either. I've read from other sources that if you're listed on Google, then you will show up on other search engines soon after, but I decided to submit my URL to both just in case.

It takes time to generate quality content and adapt the site to today's standards, but it's definitely worth it. I haven't received substantial traffic yet, but things are definitely looking up.

Affiliate Marketing Revisited

So again I'm trying affiliate marketing with a new approach. This time I've created a website and I'm promoting products through thoughtful reviews.

I can already tell the hardest part about this will be getting listed within search engines. It's quite a process today to try and get your site on google, yahoo, bing, etc. So that will be my next goal.

In the meantime, I plan to add more content to promote the home decorating niche. I chose this niche because it is something that I enjoy and it has the potential to be lucrative.

There are also many topics on this niche. For example, I can focus it on furniture, lighting, faucets, hardware, etc. These are resources people want to know more about and having a comprehensive site with reviews to ensure they are safe will accomplish this task.

Affiliate Marketing Adventures

I've started affiliate marketing. The title may seem intimidating, but really all you do is promote products for others or yourself. Usually these are e-books that others have written, but you can also write and promote your own. I would like to write my own e-book, but for now I'm promoting other people's products.

From what others have said, this is one of the best ways to make real money online. The key is to pick a product that you truly believe in and promote it through word of mouth. You can promote it through social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and even the question and answer websites that I've mentioned previously. One well-known site that sees millions of user traffic a day is Yahoo Answers.

The idea is to thoughtfully answer questions that relate to what you're trying to promote and offer a link to the product. You provide them with a reasonable answer, but also provide your affiliate link to try and sell the product you are promoting. The key is to do some research on the product and read reviews about it. I'd feel much better promoting a product that actually helps people improve their lives. The site I'm using to promote products is www.clickbank.com. There are hundreds of products to choose from and so far I'm promoting is www.tedswoodworking.com.

The reason I chose this product was because it seems highly valuable and provides lots of videos, pictures, and step by step procedures to help people make over 16,000 wood products. Of course, you will need the proper tools, but it is a rewarding experience. Recently I built my own coffee table. I had most of the tools, but I was shocked at how cheap the wood and screws were to build it (pictured above). I just need to add some stain and call it a day. I still saved hundreds of dollars by making this piece of furniture myself and it will make for a nice conversation piece as well.

Back to affiliate marketing. By offering your link to others you can make money from them just clicking on the link, but the real money is made from actually getting sales. Make sure you choose a product that is reasonably priced and one that offers great value for the money. Some of the more popular topics are weight loss and of course making money online.

People claim they can make a lot of good money from promoting products like this, so I'll let you know how it goes. So far this money making process is slow, but it is exciting to check my accounts and monitor the little progress I am making.