Nerdy Affiliate Adventures In Affiliate Marketing Land

Top 11 Reasons Why I LOVE Affiliate Marketing

Posted by JasperP on June 22nd, 2008

Affiliate Marketing is a great field to be in. I’ve been actively doing this type of Internet Marketing for about a year and I absolutely love it.  I highly recommend it to anyone that wants to get out of their day job and start a business online.  Here are 11 reasons why I recommend it:

1. You can choose your own hours - You can work as little as 4 hours a week or as much as 80 hours a week.  It’s your choice.
2. You can work from home while keeping your day job - This type of business allows enough flexibility to keep your day job while you work on your affiliate marketing business.
3. Requires little startup capital - There are ways to do affiliate marketing without spending a dime.  For example, doing article marketing using ezinearticles.com to generate traffic to your squidoo.com lens while promoting a clickbank product.
4. You can make money from your interests - The things we are passionate for can serve as an opportunity to make money online.  For example, if you enjoy shopping for shoes, you can create a site on different types of shoes, depending on your interests.
5. No inventory or customer service required - You are promoting as an affiliate so that means that the merchant takes care of the hard stuff.  No need to have boxes and storage for your products and definitely no need for a customer service center to handle the nasty calls!
6. You can promote virtually ANYTHING online - Nowadays, there are so many programs that allow you to sell anything online.  At the very least, you can promote an amazon.com or ebay.com product. They pretty much have everything!
7. No boss to report to - I hated having a boss, I felt like I was walking on thin glass around him. In affiliate marketing, there are no bosses to keep you in check or tell you your doing a horrible job.
8. You can take vacations whenever you want - You don’t have to work for 1-2 years to get 4 weeks of vacation per year.  If you worked hard enough on your marketing campaigns, I’m sure you’ll feel the need to give yourself a well-deserved vacation.
9. You can still work on vacation! - Since you earned that well-deserved vacation, you can still check your campaigns and statistics because all you need is an Internet connection. Lol!
10. You can make more money than you ever dreamed about - There are many affiliate marketers making THOUSANDS of dollars per month.  Some make more money in a month than people in a day job for a year.  Check out http://s.eriously.com to see some of the amazing checks these affiliate marketers bring in.
11. Affiliate marketing is easily scalable - In this business, you can create more websites, promote more products, get more visitors, etc.  This is different from a service business like consulting, doctors, accountants, and others.  You’d have to higher more help to scale the business.  Affiliate Marketing is easier to scale which is one of the reasons these marketers are able to make a lot of money really fast.

So those are some of the reasons why I LOVE affiliate marketing.  The opportunities are endless, it allows you to be as creative as you want and you can do it in the comfort of your own home.

So why do YOU love affiliate marketing? (or maybe why do you hate it? lol)

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How To Study Your Competition With Compete.com

Posted by JasperP on June 18th, 2008

Studying your competition is a skill you should master if you want to make more money as an affiliate marketer. By understanding your competition, you can create better sites, and better copywriting to outwit your competition.

The immediate benefits are:

• It’s easier to understand the visitor since some else has already done the research.
• Headlines and other web copy has already been tested for sites with months of history.
• Web sites has already been laid out for you, just take the elements from various sources and put it all together for a highly converting site.

Now here’s a tip I use pretty much all the time when I study new niches… I hope this doesn’t bite me in the end… but I study my competitors VERY CLOSELY with compete.com…

Why do I do that? Well if a competitor has been advertising in a niche for awhile, then he’s probably profitable right?

So how do I do that? Well… let’s take a popular clickbank product like Fat Loss 4 Idiots.. I think everyone is familiar with this product right? (A VERY expensive niche by the way, which I don’t recommend for any beginner/newbie)

And I use the product name “Fat Loss 4 Idiots” as the keywords:

Now here’s my little secret… I use Compete.com to determine their history!

In the screenshot above, you can see that FatLoss4IdiotsFlaw.com has been advertising since December 2007! If you are advertising for that long and getting traffic, then he must be getting something back. It would be a waste of time to just continue trying to create more traffic for the site.

Now he might be getting traffic from other sources, but from the screenshots above, you can see that he was advertising in the #2 spot for the product keyword name! I’m guessing to be in that #2 spot, that keyword must be REALLY expensive, but at the same time it MUST be converting into sales!

At that point, I would study all the different landing pages to determine what marketing angles they are using. You can then make it better than the original sites and add your own elements make it your own. Or you can even take the best elements into one awesome landing page site!

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I Just Submitted My LLC Application!

Posted by JasperP on June 9th, 2008

I just finished applying for my LLC at LegalZoom! It cost me a total of $656.00 but, I think I’m saving so much more by going through them. Supposedly, I’m saving $2000+ by using their services as opposed to working with an attorney or law firm to file my application.

I filed my business as an “Single-Member LLC taxed as an S-Corporation”. After doing some research, it seems that some other affiliates were doing the same thing, so I figured I should do the same. There are some tax benefits such as not having to pay the 15.3% self-employment tax. I’m still not quite sure what all the benefits are, but I figured I can learn about it later.

Legalzoom made is really easy to file the LLC application. They had a multiple-page questionnaire that made it easy to understand. All I did was answer the questions, submit my payment information and off it went! I’d say it took me about an hour to do the application.

So What’s Next?

Well, I’m going to start applying for some business credit cards, apply for a business bank account and start changing my affiliate accounts to the new business account. I also need to get more organized as far as accounting goes. I might just look for a tax consultant to figure all that out for me.

Paul at Uberaffiliate has a nice little summary on business credit cards on his blog:
http://uberaffiliate.com/business/business-credit-cards/

I’ll probably apply for some of those in a couple of months as soon as I get my application back.

I’m an official business! Exciting!

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My Current Success…

Posted by JasperP on June 5th, 2008

So how am I doing now? I was able to do $9,551.54 in commissions for the month of May. My ROI is around 200-250% based on my adspend. Check it out:

I’ve been trying to build up my capital so that I can spend more on advertising. I want this business to expand so I’m not planning to spend the money on a car or anything.

The mindset is totally different when working for yourself as opposed to working for someone. I’ve learned that being in business, you need to maintain good cash flow and because money moves in and out of the account regularly, especially in large amounts!

The next step for me is to expand to other networks such as AzoogleAds, NeverblueAds, and others. I’ve made some money there, but was short-lived when Google put the smackdown in Late-March 2008.

I just applied for membership at UberCamp and just subscribed to ClickConsultants. UberCamp, hosted by Paul Borque of UberAffiliate.com, is more of an intermediate-advanced affiliate marketing forum where some great affiliate marketers such as Jonathan Volk and Ian Fernando participate in.

ClickConsultants is a newbie-intermediate (advanced?) affiliate marketing forum that also focuses on affiliate marketing. They provide free landing pages per month and also have tutorials on different aspects of PPC marketing with CPA Networks.

My current goal is to make $1k/day in commissions on average across 7 days. I think breaking the $1k/day will be a bit of challenge, but knowing the goal will help me to focus on it.

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Word Play With Words - Is This Hypnotic Copywriting?

Posted by JasperP on June 3rd, 2008

I just read this AWESOME article on three types of modifiers at copyblogger.com:

http://www.copyblogger.com/modifiers/

In the article, he talks about three types of modifiers

• Resumptive Modifiers
• Summative Modifiers
• Free Modifiers

The power behind these modifiers is being able to enhance the quality of your copywriting through creative substitutions. I have no idea how to explain this one so, here are the examples from the article:

This is the original sentence: “The restaurant serves excellent sushi that bursts with flavor.”

Nothing too fancy right? Now check out what happens when you use the modifiers for each version:

• Resumptive Modifiers: “The restaurant serves excellent sushi, sushi that bursts with flavor.”
• Summative Modifiers: “The restaurant serves excellent sushi, a house specialty that bursts with flavor.”
• Free Modifiers: “The restaurant serves excellent sushi, providing flavor you can’t get anywhere else and making you want to come back for more.”
• Combining all three: “The restaurant serves excellent sushi, a house specialty bursting with flavor, a flavor so unique it makes you want to come back for more.”

So you can see that by using unique substitutions, it creates more flow and ‘bounce’ into your writing. Check out the complete article at copyblogger.com:

http://www.copyblogger.com/modifiers/

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