Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Expanding My Affiliate Empire (Part 1) - Is It Possible to be Ethical and be a Successful Affiliate?

Making money on paid surveys, paid to click, Squidoo, etc, is all very well, but I have come to the conclusion that in order to make any real money then I need to look at extending my affiliate activities. So far my affiliate "empire" is pretty small scale consisting of banners primarily placed on my website and blogs and income from these has been modest to say the least. It is time I think to step up a gear and look seriously at making money from Clickbank or PayDotCom. As a result I have researching how best to do this. As a relative newbie at making money online this is quite daunting.

What I am considering is choosing a number of Clickbank products and finding a variety of methods of promoting them. One of the aims has to be dominating related keywords relating to the selected products through writing articles. The tricky part is overcoming the fact that article directories such Ezine do not allow affiliate links in articles. I have found a couple of ways of overcoming this. Being as I am still trying to get my head around this, I won't try and describe these here as I run the risk of giving incorrect information. Instead, if you want to read more I suggest you visit the following:

http://www.carlocab.com/bum-marketing-experiment/

http://www.earnersblog.com/400-a-month-with-clickbank-article-marketing/

My first task then is to select some suitable Clickbank products. I have decided to avoid any of the making money online type products as this is a seriously overcrowded area. Beside the fact that many of them appear to be highly dubious! So I have decided to look for something a bit more niche, although there is danger of choosing products for which the potential number of customers is very small. My current thoughts are to choose products that link in somehow with my other projects.

Another criteria I have set myself is that the products I choose should be those that I would consider buying myself (or would if I had any spare cash!). I personally struggle with the idea of promoting products that I don't believe in, which is probably why I am not yet a hugely wealthy affiliate. So my first challenge is to choose products that actually interest me and are actually likely to attract sales. That way I am more likely to write convincing articles. Once I have managed that then I can start my campaign of promotion.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I personally use squidoo to get around ezinearticles. I place a few articles on a lens and then at the end of each article I place a link to my affiliate product. Has worked pretty well thus far. That way you don't link directly to your affiliate products. Ezinearticles gets and sends alot of traffic. So use them wisely.

Much Success To you,
The Billion Dollar Girl
www.thebilliondollargirl.com