Day 2
On day 2 I had a chance to see Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney), and Lee Dod’s presentation on Monetizing Communities. This talk was basically about how to develop viral sites (forum/membership sites in particular) that slowly overtime build up a solid membership base all from free search engine traffic.
These sites are monetized with well chosen and well placed contextual advertising.
It was a fascinating talk. In fact, I been talking to Tom (my business partner) about purchasing sites like these. A well monetized site that has a large active membership base can be a solid residual source of revenue for years to come.
After the talk, I had a chance to take a picture with Shoemoney…
Shoemoney is really a very nice guy, always willing to help people.
The next blockbuster talk was by Kris Jones, CEO of Pepperjam, on the “Confluence of Search and Affiliate Marketing.” What an AWESOME talk! He talked about the power of search arbitrage, and gave an excellent outline on how a newbie affiliate can get started in the world of search arbitrage.
As you know search arbitrage, or ppc affiliate marketing, is my specialty! So I was very excited to hear the CEO of Pepperjam talking highly of this method of affiliate marketing.
LESSONS LEARNED
At dinner that night I had a chance to speak with some other very successful super affiliates. I talked to one guy who was running 500 affiliate offers at one time, making $20-$50/day from each one. WOW!
Not only this, Kris Jones had mentioned during his talk that he became a super affiliate by promoting 2000 affiliate programs, generating $50/month profit for each! Amazing.
This approach to affiliate marketing is definitely contrary to everything I’ve been teaching. That is, you should focus on a few big affiliate offers and build several authority sites and work towards generating a $100k+/month per affiliate offer.
That’s what’s cool about affiliate marketing, there’s so many creative ways to make it work!
Nevertheless, I will continue to advocate building a handful of affiliate sites instead of 1000s. Here why:
- Long Term Profits - once you build an established large affiliate site, it more likely to make long term profits than a small campaign making $50/day profit
- Google’s landing page “quality” score - Since paid search and natural search are converging, small mini sites won’t last long term-especially on Google
- Competitive advantage – having just a few big affiliate sites gives you the ability to continually improve your sites, split test your landing pages to improve conversions, revamp the site design every six months, etc, etc. With 1000s of sites this could be a near impossible task, certainly impossible for most affiliates. With rising ppc costs, continually improving site conversions is a necessity!
- Low maintenance – Once you have a large site optimized, maintaining it is easy, especially compared to monitoring the performance of 1000s of smaller affiliate sites
Would you rather try to keep 1000 plates spinning or just a couple?
affilaite summit kris jones monetizing websites pepperjam shoemoney
Thanks Amit and Derek. I’ll skip that marketing courses and head to the book store for Perry Marshall’s Ultimate Guide to Adwords instead.
Andrew,
Thanks for addressing the issue of content creation. I’m curious to know where you are finding writers who work for $5 a page. Most of the eLance article writers I have seen who actually have a good command of English and write well charge a lot more than $5 a page. Maybe I’m not negotiating enough.
It would be great if you could share your “insider strategies” on quality content control and selecting the right people to outsource to. I’ve found some great people on eLance, but they’re not insanely cheap not do I want to insult them by nickel-and-diming them down to nothing. I think what Amit has said is that if you find someone good, expect to pay them well because they’re in pretty high demand.
Hi Andrew,
Yes, $1k-$2k/month is fairly typical for the amount of revenue that I generate from my content sites just free traffic. Small compared to what I make from PPC from these site, but it’s a great source of long term revenues & profits, especially if you continue to add content and get backlinks to your site.
That $1k-$2k/month can grow to $1k/day, I know one affiliate who have done this in 6 months by ranking high in Yahoo and MSN.
Thanks for your insight!
“That’s what’s cool about affiliate marketing, there’s so many creative ways to make it work!”
Not to take away from the rest of what you’ve written, but that sentence (plus the lead up to it) is the best thing you’ve written on this blog. It’s a good thing for all of us to keep in mind.
Tim: I think you might’ve seen it, but I gave some content creation suggestions on my blog.
Amit’s also flagged my post in his recent update (thanks Amit!)
This is Amit’s recent post:
http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/andrew-wee-headhunting-for-writers-and-crowdsourcing/
I love reading your blog and appreciate your time to help others. I’ve spent the last two weekends learning about affiliate marketing and all the different programs on how to make money on the internet so I’m a major newbie but eager to learn. It has been a great blessing to find your site which I know will fast track my education.
I am a web developer of 10+ years and am finally coming out of “The Matrix”. In my real job I make over 10k/month but I realize that being tied to a desk for 40+ is not a fulfilling life.
I’m creating five websites but my sites are more services or application sites that solve a problem for people or provide quick look up services. I was going to count on monthly subscriptions and not PPC or affiliates but I’m rethinking this concept.
My apologies for the length but I wanted to make a proper introduction and it’s my hope to meet you one day and shake your hand as your site has already given me great hope.
My question to you is, in your opinion, is it worth my time to finish these sites and try to make money with subscriptions? or should I try to strictly go with a free service and utilize PPC or affiliate programs?
Please remember that no content will be written specifically for affiliate products but to give you an idea of what one of my sites is doing, it’s called whereskaraoke.com, the site will be a directory listing of karake bars around the world. Users will look up karaoke times, directions etc. for when they are looking to sing. Again, no real content but hopefully much traffic.
With Gratitude
Hello,
I enjoy your writings immensely. I also find them very inspirational. For any other n00bs that may be listening I would like to give a “testimonial” to the effectiveness of what you write about.
Actually some of the “esoteric” stuff is just as valuable if not more so than the traditional advice. For instance, I’ve read alot about visualization via personal development literature. I got a Copeac account on May 12th. I put up a “vision board” where I work saying “$100/day made online within the next 30-60 days).
Keep in mind, I know absolutely NOTHING about AM, I didn’t even know what a “landing page” was until April. Anyway thus far I have made $4,506 in commisions, the bulk of that happened in about 4 weeks — in other words I met my goals.
To be fair, I had launched about 15 campaigns (and I do this pretty much full time…yes to screw with my graduate school professors, lol)….but to be honest with you I don’t think the time was as much of a factor as my studying the best practices of people like you Amit and following the advice religiously.
I have not replaced my old goals with a new vision board that says “I make $500/day within the next 60-90 days). When I have met that goal for a continuous period of 30 days or more, I will move on to a more ambitious goal of $5,000.
Also to testify to what you said, I want to make a career out of this so I concentrate on one niche – a huge multi-milion dollar niche – and I planning to run multiple campaigns with different marketing angles.
OK, I know that post is long but I really wanted to give some newbie inspiration that if they stick to what you guys say and follow it and read it and ACT and test and fail and try again (15+ campaigns I failed out before I hit my first successful one….when I did I make like $200 my first day)…they will succeeed.
NOW FOR MY QUESTION!!!
I want to master the art of “learning while I learn” i.e. direct linking to affiliate landing pages. I work in online education and I have found that people pretty much already know what they want they just need to be guided to the sign up page (I only do leads no sales this is another “focus” I decided upon).
However my problem is that I don’t have any coding skills and if more than one person is displaying the same url there are problems in Google.
I really, really, really wish someone would provide a tutorial about how a non-techie can still pull off direct linking via Adwords.
For instance I have heard stuff like buying a new domain then using that as the display url, but what happens if Google goes to the url of the display and they don’t see anything.
I made most of my profits through blogging but with the merchant’s landing pages already good, it doesn’t make sense to make another landing page.
My strategy is that I really need to get good at 1)keyword research and 2)writing ads….when profits roll in I can pay for content. Actually I figure that 1) and 2) are my highest income producing activities and the 2 things I CAN’T hire out so it makes sense to focus on learning/doing these in the beginning.
And if the merchants already have good landing pages, why try to recreate something that is already working.
Any just to restate my question:
CAN YOU PLEASE DO A POST OF HOW TO GO ABOUT DOING DIRECT LINKING VIA ADWORDS?
If this post could address such issues as:
1) QS and quality score optimization
2) display url vs. destination url
3)how do do redirects if you are a non techie
Anyway Amit, thanks so much for your wisdom. I have my visualization board up and I can’t wait to write back with a “testimonial” as to how your advice really works!
When you give you truly do receive 10 fold…
Thanks!
I have a n00b question tha
p.s. I meant to say “EARNing while I am LEARNing” i.e. using direct linking to make profit as I master keyword research and ad writing….then eventually focusing in on content sites that I can get indexed to promote my offers….