Things I Have Learned About Making Money As An Affiliate

I am only two weeks in to my attempts to expand my affiliate empire and during this time I have learned a few things that I thought I would share with you:

1. Making money as an affiliate takes time and patience.
2. I have little time and no patience!
3. It helps if you are selling something that you have some knowledge of and interest in. That way it makes it much easier to write articles and contribute meaningfully to forums.
4. I have little knowledge about jewellery!
5. It is more difficult to market something when your main keyword has two different spellings depending on where you live in the world.
6. "Jewellery" can also be spelled "jewelry"!

No money made yet. Early days I guess!

Inflate Your Earnings With Helium

At Helium you can utilize your writing skills to earn money. There are a variety of way you can earn:

• Pick a title (there are hundreds to choose from) and write an article according to the guidelines given. You earn a share of the advertising according to how many times your article is viewed.
• You can choose a title from the Helium Marketplace and write an article according to the guidelines given. This is your opportunity to become a freelance writer and have your article published as the titles provided are from a range of publications looking for specific articles. Payments for these are generally between $20 to $100. You will only be paid for these if you article is selected.
• You can compete in writing competitions. You will only be paid for these if you gain first, second or third place. There are generally several competitions taking place at any one time with a number of titles to choose from.

What you can't do is put links in your articles to your website or blog (such as with Ezine and other article directories). However, you can put links in your profile.

So far I haven't really put my mind to making money from Helium; I've only written one article and made a grand total of $0.02. I haven't attempted the Marketplace or competitions yet. So this is all on my "to do" list and I need to put some time aside to write some articles.

Extra Earnings for October

Another mixed month and still not as much as I would have liked:

Surveys - £82 (£64 Opinion Bar, £10 Ipsos, £8 Lightspeed)
Ebay - £20.90
Sale of free range eggs - £5.40
Road Tax refund - £35

Total = £143.40

I am looking to get my affiliate earnings off the ground over the next couple of months, so maybe things will start to improve from there!

Expanding My Affiliate Empire (Part 3) - A Plan of Action

After having spent a few days away, I have had some time to reflect on how I can progress plans for expanding my affiliate activities and to actually make some decent money online. I have decided (out of necessity) that this needs to be a nil cost project. As a result, progress may take a little longer to get off the ground. So my plan is as follows:

1. Select a range of products to promote. I have decided I will choose a wide variety of products and will not limit myself to any one category. Most will be Clickbank digital products, but some will be physical products from Pepperjam. I have decided on 10 products, although I will focus on just 3 initially and gradually increase.

2. Use Squidoo as a landing page for my products.

3. Write articles for each product and submit to Ezine and other article directories, making changes between each submission so that they do not look like duplicates.

4. Write more articles and submit. Repeat!

5. Promote articles and Squidoo pages through social bookmarking (Digg, etc.), related forums, blogs, traffic exchanges, free ads, and any other free method I can find.

6. Write Hub Pages and Knols related to my products.

7. Put any available banners/links on blogs and my website.

8. Once I start making sales then a percentage (I haven't settled on a figure yet) can be reinvested on pay per click campaigns, solo ads, domain names for my affiliate links (if necessary) and any other affordable and effective method that I may come across.

This all very new to me and is very much a learning process, but from the extensive reading that I have been doing (mostly from other people's blogs) this is the process I have settled on. Progress will be limited by my "nil cost" principle and also by limits on my time as I work full-time and have other demands on my time (see my other blog for more on this). So actually my first task is write myself a schedule for the coming weeks to make sure I get everything I need to do done. So what do you all think? Please let me know via your comments if there is anything else and particularly if I have got anything hopelessly wrong!