Affiliate Programs

Okay, this is the moment some of you have been waiting for! The results of my Make Money Online Janurary $2500 Challenge. If you read my previous post, then you know I got off to a late start. In fact, I only had a little under two weeks to work on this project, but I attacked it anyway knowing I’d probably come up short. Which I did. Here are the details.

The System I Used To Make Money In Two Weeks

If you read the mid-month Challenge update, you know up to that point I had made only approximately $200. So I’ll pick up from there.

Since I was really strapped for time, I had to change the way I would try and reach $2500 in two weeks. What I finally decided on was to build two simple WordPress blogs and 2 Blogger blogs.

I then searched for two different products or service affiliate programs that I could make anywhere from $9 or more from each sale. I chose products in the Health Care and Pets niches. My other offers were in the $20 to $35 range.

One thing you want to keep in mind when choosing an affiliate products is whether or not it has appeal to people who are desperate for solutions. The more desperate, the better the product. For example, Gamblers and Smokers are two desperate groups of people. One group wants to learn quick tips for making money with Gambling, the other wants to learn how to stop smoking. Addicts are a great group of people to target.

I started building a Network of profiles on Social Media sites. I’m not a big fan of Social Media, but for this system, I needed some eyeballs on my offers and I needed them quick! So I made multiple profiles on places like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Answers and others. For example, for this Challenge, I made 17 MySpace profiles and 8 Yahoo profiles.

In order for all your profiles to be effectice, they have to look like real profiles. If you get lazy and create a bunch of spammy profiles, you’ll get them banned very quickly.

Another thing I did (which proved to be the most profitable) was find 8 forums that were relevant for my Health Care offer and 5 forums that were relevant for my Pet care offer. Again, I made a profile on each forums and made it look good. This takes time but will pay off if you don’t get greedy and try to spam the forums.

How To Set Up WordPress and Blogger Blogs To Use This System

To be effective, once again your blogs need to look legitimate. So I set up each WordPress blog with 5 to 7 pages of Content, an About page along with Privacy and TOS pages. I did the same with my Blogger blogs.

The only two plugins I used with the WordPress blogs were Redirection (this is an important one) and All In One SEO pack.

I didn’t worry about getting them indexed quickly. They wouldn’t be live long enough to bring in the organic traffic I needed to make these offers pay off. I needed them as Sales pages to divert traffic to so I could pitch them my offers.

On each WordPress blog, I used the main index page as my landing/sales page and all the additional content pages were redirected to my affiliate link to the Merchants. The important thing here is that these index pages looked like normal blog post, not those long spammy looking sales page most of us are used to seeing. Each sales/landing page was written like a review or as a product info page. You just need to make it irresistible for them to go and sign up once they’ve finished reading it!

Where The Money Came From

Since I was strapped for time, I started pushing the offers before I had all my networks set up. I normally would have cultivated those profiles for a few weeks or months before using the links. But I just didn’t have to time so I had to do the best I could.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to make your Profiles and your post look normal and not spammy. If you don’t know how to write a good blog or forum post recommending a product and not make it look spammy, then go to your favorite forums and start reading. If you’ve been in this business long enough, you’ll soon be able to spot the spammers from the regular posters.

Another area where some of you get hung up at is the nofollow vs do follow links on some Social Media sites and forums. It doesn’t matter! You’re looking for traffic here, not backlinks that push link juice to your sites. Leave links to your blogs everywhere you can without making them look spammy and forget about whether or not they pass PR.

My most profitable avenues for income were from the Forums and Yahoo Answers.

My conversion rate on the Health Care product was around 4 percent and my conversion rates for the Pet Care products ranged from 3 to 6 percent. The highest converting of these was one Forum and Yahoo Answers.

I ended the month earning $562 for the Health Care products from Forums and Yahoo Answers and $157 from other Social Media.

For my Pet Care products, I ended the month at $781 from Forums and Yahoo Answers traffic and $117 from other Social Media.

The grand total of these came out to be $1617. When you add the $200.43 I had already made, the total for the month comes out to be $1817.43. About $700 short of my goal but pretty darn good in the small amount of time I had to make it.

Once again I have to tell you that in those last two weeks, I spent an enormous amount of time making this money. I worked from 2 to 4 hours in the evenings and a lot of weekend time.

Although you can make money with this system, I wouldn’t advise it for long term income. It’s just too tedious and time consuming for me. For the amount of time I spent on this project, I could have set up 6 blogs, wrote content for each and started building backlinks to them for long term growth and income.

Using Social Media To Make Money

I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it here. Social Media doesn’t convert well. The reason I believe is because these people are not looking to buy anything. They are also Internet Savvy. In order for your affiliate programs to do well, you really need to target people who are looking to buy what you have to sell. Simple technique but one that many people fail to implement. That’s the real secret to making money on the Internet!

The reason the Forums and Yahoo Answers did so well is because I targeted my post to people looking for what I had to sell.

Another important thing to remember is not to spam the Forums or Yahoo Answers. For every post I put a link in, I had made around 10 to 15 helpful and informative post without a link in them. Many of you get greedy or impatient and use short, spammy comments to leave a link in and then wonder why you get banned or or links removed. You have to make your profiles and comments look real!

With this Challenge, I only had 4 MySpace profiles banned. Which is very good considering the time I had.

The Giveaway

As promised, I’ve decided to give something away for the followers of this Challenge. Even though I built several Squidoo lenses, I’ll be keeping those for further use. I can’t stress enough how important it is to build good Squidoo lenses for making money and backlinks. The best resource I’ve found for building high quality Squidoo lenses is an ebook from Tiffany Dow titled “Flip That Lens“.

What I decided to give away to 3 readers is 3 of my domains. These don’t have sites on them and you’ll have to be registered with NameCheap in order to get them. It’s free to sign up for an account at NameCheap, so 3 of you can expect emails from me in the next few days. If you haven’t signed up for a free account at NameCheap, you might want to do it now.

Final Thoughts

For now, I’ve got to get back to my sites that make me money. The way I earn money online is by building sites and getting them ranked in the Search Engines. Once built and ranked, these sites are pretty much hands off except for building links to them and adding content once a month or so. This is long term work and I don’t expect to make money with any of these sites for at least 6 months and most likely a year or more. Many people don’t have the patience to make sites like these! I love free targeted search engine traffic!

If you decide to try the system I used, take your time doing it. Don’t get impatient and spend some time building believable profiles. Add pictures (you can get them at Istockphoto.com) and other stuff that real users add to their profiles. Don’t spam other people. Build friends slowly and don’t blast them with alerts.

Now you know that it is possible to make decent money in a short amount of time. The question is, do you have the will power it takes to spend the time and effort doing it!?