The age old question of being new to Affiliate Marketing, what should I set my goal at? The answer is usually around the $50-$100 a day range. That is conservative and generally speaking though. Affiliate Marketing is no different than anything else you may encounter in life. If you still working a job then just consider it a new one. There are going to be things that you have to learn and experience before you become a top dog around the work place. The same applies to sitting in your cozy little office with the coffee pot brewing, it is going to take some adapting and adjusting before you get comfortable.

Aside from the fact that there are a lot of things you will have to go thru and learn from, you also have to deal with learning pace. Everyone is different. Some people will go out and earn $500 in their first month. I’ve personally helped and seen it done. Others may take at least 6 months before making their first dollar. Uhh umm, Hello? That would be me. Some may even take more than a year.

In my opinion you need to start with something you know. I love gaming. More importantly I love gaming on the Xbox 360. Some of the first offers I ever ran were for Xbox 360’s and Xbox 360 games. On top of running CPA offers, I also sold xbox 360’s and equipment thru Amazon. Hell, I did not sell a lot but at least I was selling something. I knew enough about the niche that I could write about it without it being a strain. As a matter of fact, I knew the niche so well and being a member of the Halo Forums, General Gaming Forums and MLG PRO, I could relate and interpret the lingo used among gamers. Knowing this I could adjust my writing style to something that was actually INTERESTING to read for gamers. Knowing what you’re doing is a crucial component in Affiliate Marketing. Without knowing the ins and outs of your market, do you think shooting from the hip is going to be enough in that market to make a comfortable living? Maybe after a year or so when you have printed so much shit that you have so many rankings or ads running that people cant help but to come to your site. Now you have to deal with will they return or not?

There’s a large misconception online that only very few people are making money online. This cannot be further from the truth. There are a TON of people making money online but you may only know about a handful of them. Two of the largest net profit producing affiliate marketers that I know are virtually undetectable online. They just assume to keep it that way so we wont go into details but the first with CJ and the other with Linkshare are doing incredible numbers as affiliates. It amazes me that so many people procrastinate and verbally cut down others who are making money online. I really dont know why this is. Jealousy perhaps? Maybe the ebook selling and ripping off? Who knows and who cares. The ones that procrastinate are the ones likely to reach the pot of gold later than most.

With that said there is an important piece of the marketing online puzzle that I feel is very important to marketers. It’s called risk taking. Now if you have ever got scammed in the past then your mind presets itself to calculate risks. In my opinion this is a good and bad thing. While it’s a good thing to calculate risks, it’s a bad thing to over analyze them to a point that you talk yourself out of taking one.

One of the hardest questions I get is “how do I make money without any money to invest”? This question is so hard to answer because while you CAN make money without investing any it takes a tremendous amount of willpower and work ethic. It takes so much, that I normally ignore this question altogether because I will tell you right now that I normally will not waste my time replying to a stranger of whom I know nothing about. If I had an idea of what you have accomplished so far and what your plans are going forward then I might be inclined to reply.

A lot has been covered with the 3 major search engines as of late with the CPA Marketing Series so like you, I feel as if even I may need to take a break even if it is just for a few days. We will resume the Series soon with other great places to advertise and even get into the web placement and email marketing side of things with CPA offers. For now I would like to talk about a question that was asked in the forum just awhile ago.

Whoopie: I have a shedload of ideas and things to try. Maybe it’s the AS and ADHD, but I’m having a *really* hard time pushing things through. I have … far too many ideas on the go at once, and I’m not covering all the bases I need to and therefore not seeing the results that I should. It’s not that things aren’t working, it’s that I can’t focus to push them to work even better - if that makes any sense.Anyone else have this? How have you dealt with it?

I and every other Entrepreneur/Marketer have and will experience this. This is just the nature of working online. I remember when I first started out it seemed like the only way to make money online was to write and ebook or promote one. Being online for 3+ years now, things could not be any farther from that. As a matter of fact, I’ve made my living by not even following that business model. It’s a good way (obviously for some) but not the “be all, end all”.

That’s easy.  4 words.

Love what you do.

The following is sparked by the dozens of emails, IM’s and Pm’s I receive weekly. What is the single most important thing I would tell someone that wanted to get started making money online?

You have probably heard this a time or to. Matter of fact, you may be tired of hearing it. If that’s the case then I really fell sorry for you. I cannot imagine someone trying to make money online and NOT liking it. I am not speaking just about success here either. I am speaking in terms in failure. What?

If you cannot sit back and get a chuckle from your screw ups then your probably the uptight serious kind. (remind me to not hang out with you at events). Seriously though, it is in my experience and damn near every success story that I ever read that someone has faced failures before they met success. Why is that?

It’s because working online is probably new to 99% of the people trying it. When you got hired at your job were you an instant badass on your first day? No, most likely not. You probably struggled a bit on focusing on everything that was being taught to you by a manager or trainer. You were probably excited at first about your new job but once you learned it, you became bored. Even after working years at your job, you probably had those *bad days* where nothing went as planned or you could not complete a task before re-doing it two or three times.

Do you see a pattern emerging here folks?

This same pattern is going to apply online as well. Your going to have bumps and bruises, your going to lose focus, and your going to have failures that cause you to re-do something or quit it altogether and move on to something new.

I went thru my archives and hand picked some posts I thought were pretty good before we head into the New Year. Enjoy!

Back In August I gave some general tips over making money with P2P Networks and Torrents. Torrents are still alive and kicking and I have not really spoken of them since this last post. I really should but the fact of the matter is that this method is very petty and so very easy to do. However, I bet 99% of the people who read this post probably didn’t even try it or quickly gave up on it. Let’s take a look at just one program I promoted with these petty torrent methods.

Here are payments for the last 6 months. For a method so easy I sure seen a lot of bitching from people who said “it’s too much work”.  Here’s what happens when you dedicate yourself to a project for a couple of hours a week no matter how petty, simple and boring it is.

Also in August, I wrote a free report detailing how I go about getting high rankings for articles. I normally do not write my own articles but I do however use the methods described because it seems nobody can get it right even with a guide. I guess that just goes to show that what works for someone, may not necessarily work for another. However, the guide is free and it’s a great read….(IMO). :)

In September I also introduced a way to advertise your blog cheaply utilizing Stumbleupon. I have tested this out a few times and it seems to work well. When I say that, what I really mean is that as cheap as it is, you get back about the same return. However, it’s a great traffic building method and I am sure the right type of blog will make the difference.

Thinking about 2008 has been a thought on my mind since getting home yesterday. Many things have changed over the past year. Google SEO and PPC has changed quite a bit, video marketing has skyrocketed and even Email Marketing has changed. (Speaking in respect to aweber, my autoresponder service that is a required double optin service now).

So what does the future hold?

I don’t know for sure. Although I have a photographic memory, I still haven’t developed any senses to see in the future. Which really sucks, because if I could, work would sure be a lot easier. However, I have some huge thoughts on what we MIGHT see.

1. Blogs will continue to kick the shit out of static sites. However, regular bloggers will probably turn more into user interactive communities. Take a look at CashTactics. I have already begun to do this. I have incorporated a forum where we can all get together on a more personal and regular bases to talk about every aspect of making money and marketing online.

It won’t stop with community sites though. Bloggers will also be podcasting and vlogging (video blogging) a lot more. As a matter of fact, your going to see something I hope that will interest you greatly in a few weeks. I will have a live streaming video feed so you can communicate with me at certain times and watch, read and listen as I respond to questions. Websites are still great in my opinion but will not stand a chance against someone that will regularly communicate with readers. While website owners will rely on their content to do all their preselling, they most likely rely on SEO, PPC and every other traffic method out there. That’s great but that is traditional also. The more social interaction you see with a website, the more likely you will return. Returning visitors are key and without them, your site sucks. Period.

November 2006 is a month I will never forget. That month signified a tremendous change in my life. That change was quiting my jobs and working solely online. I had been working part time for almost two priors to that, but it wasn’t until then that I decided that working online was going to be my next career.

What factors played roles in this?

Quite simply, I developed a skill that I could write at astonishing rates. Don’t believe me? Ask anyone from the RJ Forum or BHW when I get on a roll. Simply put, most people piss and moan when it’s time to do a little article writing for promotion or whatever. In the very few minutes that they whine, I can complete an article. I was lucky to develop this skill from companies such as Associated Content, MPAM, SSWUG, and Freelance sites. At first I was horrible. After about a month though, it was not uncommon to pump out at least a dozen articles in a couple of hours. Some sites paid me more, but the most I made in one month was about $2500 writing articles and I never once worked more than a couple of hours every night. I couldn’t, I was holding down two jobs at any one time, and I was also into auto content generation. I developed the skill fast, and I never once grumbled while writing.