How much do I need?

As I’ve said many times before, campaigns will usually have a much higher failure rate than success rate. It’s just the way it goes, your friend may be making $500/day promoting dating offers while you lose $500/day trying to do the same. From the get go, you need to prepare to run more than one campaign.

I would say a range of 3-5 offers is a good starting point. Pick one campaign that you think will perform well with search traffic. Pick another that might work with social. Test out PPV on another. Pick one that you just think you’ll do a good job selling.

As far as cash goes, I would spend no less than $200 on each campaign (traffic alone, not factoring in any design/coding costs…do that yourself!). This will give you a decent sampling enough to see if there’s at least potential in the offer. Remember that if you lose money on the $200 you spent, that does not mean the campaign is a bust. For instance if you spend $200 and make $100, that shows decent potential in the offer. Work on getting your ad CTR up and optimizing your landing page, and that offer can easily be flipped around and profiting.

Now we know that we need $600-$1,000 minimum to run a solid test, it’s time to find a money tree to pluck the bills from.

Note: most of these things will require you to learn a new skill. Making money online isn’t always easy and can take a ton of work (especially in the beginning), so I don’t want to see any tears about having to learn Photoshop.

Method #1: Web Design

Web design is a great way to make money, but also probably takes the most skill out of any of these “free” methods. You have to be somewhat creative to make unique custom pages for people.

One type of way to make money designing is by designing landing pages for other affiliates. I’ve seen some pretty crappy looking pages selling for $40-50, or in $100 packages with a bunch of other crappy pages. Learn how to make pages that blow these types out of the water, sell them for the same price, and you’ll have your $1k in a month.

If you get good enough, you can branch out from simple landing pages and design full custom websites for people. It’s possible to make 5x the amount of starter cash you need from designing 1 site for a business. I pay one of the design firms I use $80/hr for their work, and it’s worth every penny.

Another way is by making skins for Wordpess and selling them on sites like ThemeForest.net.

My favorite way: find local businesses around you that have crappy websites. In 30 minutes I guarantee you that you’ll find at least 10-15 really, REALLY bad pages. Like 1995 AOL flashing text all over again bad, it’s crazy how outdated some businesses are when it comes to the web. Approach these companies and say you’ll design them a much more modern site, explain to them you’ll set up a “content management system” for them to easily change things, and that you’ll set up free SEO to boost their sites ranking. What you really do: grab one of the really nice WordPress themes from ThemeForest, customize it to add in the businesses logo/content, and then add a couple SEO plugins. They’ll most likely be blown away at how nice the site looks and should be willing to shell out at least $300-500 to you, sometimes more.

Method #2: Coding

Coding may take you a bit longer to learn, but takes less skill than design. If you plan on being an affiliate in the first place though, coding and design are two things I would strongly recommend learning.

Companies and individuals need coders all the time to fix problems and code sites up for them, whore yourself out on oDesk and make that money.

Method #3: SEO

Search Engine Optimization is a way to run affiliate campaigns for free. Instead of paying for fast, guaranteed traffic, you rank organically and get clicks for free.

SEO generally takes a little bit to learn and then traffic to your site grows slowly, but it’s free and beggars can’t be choosers. You can create regular affiliate landing pages to rank, or go the autoblog route and make hundreds of worthless blogs that make you $1/day from Adsense. I’m not an SEO expert though so unfortunately I can’t really give any pointers.

Kris Jones’ SEO Blueprint would be a decent place to start, or there’s unlimited amounts of free information on the mighty Google just waiting to be found.

Method #4: Fiverr Whoring

If you’re really desperate and want to make that $1,000 five bucks at a time, create an account on Fiverr and start posting things you’ll do for $5. I actually use this site quite a bit for mediocre work at slave-labor prices. Some of the users there will have 50 jobs in their queue, so you know they’re making money.

Check out the site, look at what people are doing for $5 and then check out how many orders are in they’re queue. If it’s hot, you should be able to make $1k slowly but surely.

Method #5: Blogging

Blogging is a great free way to make money. As with most of the other methods it takes some time to see the bucks roll in but, if you’re looking for fast money that’s going to be affiliate marketing…and you can’t afford that yet.

Blog about whatever you’re passionate about (as long as it’s not 18th century rocking chairs…but hey maybe there’s a market for that). Whatever topic you choose, become really involved in every social media outlet there is in that community. Join forums and post on them. Join twitter and tweet/reply to other people with similar interests.

After you have a few hundred readers, it’ll be time to sell some ad space and start pushing affiliate links in your posts/reviews.

Method #6: Write Articles

There’s always people looking to have somebody write articles for their SEO sites. I see article writing services published all the time in the Buy/Sell/Trade section of forums. Thanks to Google, it’s pretty easy to learn enough about any topic someone wants you to write about. Most of the time they’re just using them to boost their sites ranking and don’t even really care about your level of expertise on the subject.

Method #7: Craigslist/Ebay Flipping

Simple tactic: Find a [Red Bike] on Amazon or Overstock for $75. List the [Red Bike] on eBay or Craigslist for $100. “Sell” the [bike] and then just buy it on Amazon and enter the Ebay persons address into the “Shipping Address” section.

I think I remember someone who used to do this all the time with watches. Not sure how well it works any more, but might be something to play around with.

Method #8: Create “Turnkey” Websites

Go to Flippa and search “turnkey”. You’ll see a bunch of crappy looking sites that people are selling for $100-1,000. Believe it or not, people buy these sites.

People will take a WordPress theme and just plug in an RSS feed along with the Amazon affiliate program and it will autopost different things on sale. The sites are pretty useless, but people out there think “It’s automatic and I’ll make money, automatically!” so they don’t really think twice before swiping their card.

Other people write an eBook, create a sales page for it, and then sell that as a “turnkey” Clickbank product.

Method #9: Make a Website

Remember that sites like Facebook started in a dorm room and virtually for free. Come up with a good idea of your own, fork over $10 for a domain, bust your ass getting a basic design up and coded yourself, and then promote the idea wherever you can.

Method #10: Credit Card?

Credit cards are probably the easiest way to solve cash flow issues, but can easily be the deadliest. Make sure that you’re going to be able to find some way to make back $1,000 if you lose it all and charge it to your Amex. Find a street corner and get to work.
 

I didn’t really go too in depth about any of the methods here (maybe another post for that), but I just wanted to get some ideas out there on ways to make money without having to spend money. There are other ways out there to really scrape for some cash, but the list above should give you a pretty good start.

Now for the explanation. If you’re anything like me, some days you’re at your house chugging away at campaigns and you just get bored. Maybe most of your friends on IM are working and can’t talk, you don’t want to wait for people to reply to your forum posts, and you just want to take a break. That’s why I set up a small chat room attached to UberAffiliate. I plan on just popping it up in a new window and letting it chill in the corner of one of my monitors. I used to hang around the Cakes chat room, but the past few times I’ve gone in there hasn’t really been anybody on.

This is also a way I think I’ll be able to connect with you guys (the readers) better. A lot of you send me IMs during the day and I’m either not paying attention to Adium, or by the time I get back to the computer to respond you’re already gone.

So if you just want a place to hang out and chat/shoot the breeze with other marketers, just head to the chat room.

Nothing big, maybe I’ll see you there maybe not! Oh if you have your own IRC program that you’re more used to, the channel is #affchat.

Twitter on Quantcast

I took a quick look over at Quantcast on Twitter to see what the demographics looked like.

The site caters to a more educated audience.The typical visitor subscribes to New Yorker and reads realclearpolitics.com.

Ok so we have more educated people on Twitter, and it looks like the audience is a little older than the 13 year old Myspace crowd. So this kind of makes ringtones or something like that not the best choice.

So what do older people want? I don’t know, the really old chaps like wine, cigars, etc. Mid range people maybe want Starbucks coupons, New York Times subscriptions, maybe a better mortgage. All of these things have affiliate offers. It looks like 30% of the users have a child in their household…maybe you coupon guys can find a Toys ‘R Us coupon for them, haha.

Do I have any idea that this will work? No…it just came to mind as I was on Twitter earlier. I’m in the whole webmaster crowd on Twitter, but I’m sure there’s normal people out there that don’t know what affiliate marketing is. It’s just a potentially large traffic source that looks untapped; perhaps people are doing it already and I just haven’t gotten any spam.

Good luck and don’t blame me for any of this.

DISCLAIMER : These are my ideas only, and I am not recommending you take action on anything I say. If you piss Twitter off and they sue you or something crazy, don’t point the finger at me. I’m only thinking out loud here, if it sparks any ideas in your mind then so be it.

Yahoo stock dropped from around $28 to $23 per share, and I’m no stock expert so I couldn’t tell you how much more it will drop. I think it was around $19 when MSN made the offer, and then spiked up close to $30 (again just going off what I heard). Kris predicted that Google would make a bid on Yahoo once the stock drops off more, and then Microsoft would battle it out with Google. Once again I’m no stock expert, but it seems like a smart thing to do would be buy a boatload of YHOO stock when it’s at a low, and once Google/Microsoft start a bidding war stock should spike back up and you could make a nice coin. I might throw some money into it myself after a little more research.

What if Google ended up winning Yahoo? How would that change our strategies as affiliate marketers? We all know Yahoo Search Marketing has been poorly trying to replicate the Adwords system for some time now. The new addition of minimum bids made it even more retarded and pathetic. I have sites that have Great QS in Google with $0.02 minimum bids, but they have like $0.67 minimum bids in Yahoo. Even taking that into consideration, would I want the two to become one? Probably not right now, Yahoo still does a lot of things stupid that you can take advantage of.

I’d just feel bad for poor MSN if this all happened, haha.

This post wasn’t actually in my agenda, but I’m squeezing it in as I just kind of stumbled over it and found it interesting. I was browsing YouTube, and found a site that is possibly cashing in on hundreds of thousands of free impressions. I was on vacation yesterday and missed American Idol which I like to watch (I love music and play the drums), so I was watching some of the performers on last night’s episode when I stumbled upon the user RealIdolFans. It was pretty obvious what caught my eye, here’s a screenshot of the very beginning (and end) of the video :
 

 
Basically it’s an ad telling users that they can get their American Idol ringtones at IdolRings.com. If you go to Idol Rings you can see it’s just a rip of a basic ringtone landing page, they just altered the graphics a little bit to make it look like it’s IdolRings’ custom website.

When the video of the show actually starts, they have a little Idol looking watermark thing in the bottom corner of the video. Their ad is showing during the entire video, and almost looks like it’s a part of the show.
 

 

They also have a link to the landing page in the first line of the video description.
 

 

I looked in a little further and checked out the profile of RealIdolFans and saw the following information :
 

 

RealIdolFans joined just 1 day ago, but in that day has watched almost 1,100 videos. Now either this person is a REAL YouTube addict, or they had some automated script go through and watch 1,000 movies to make their profile look credible.

After one day, this person already has over 50 video subscribers, and around 10,000 views per video (most have over 10k, one of them has over 50k views in less than 24 hours). With every new week, subscribers for RealIdolFans should jump up as well as video views. This person has found a way to get thousands of ringtone clicks at no cost (aside from taking time to upload all the videos). Do I have any idea if they’re even making money with it? No, but I’m sure they’ve done at least a few leads.

Moral of this story…once again think outside the box when it comes to affiliate marketing! There are plenty of other ways to make money on affiliate programs aside from just PPC landing pages. This person is exploiting the millions of YouTube views every day by building a follow-ship and then using it to sell ringtones to the perfect target audience.