How To Start Making A PROFIT With Affiliate Marketing

April 27th, 2009 Add Your Comments

They you are, sat at your computer. You’ve searched Google high and low for information about affiliate marketing. You’ve read every blog and e-book on the subject and you’re ready to go. If there were exams in the understanding of the importance of landing pages, keywords, ad-copy, split-testing you’d pass with flying colours. You decide today’s the day. Pumped up from the glowing reviews from every make money online blogger on the planet you start your investment – $99 on “The Affiliate Theme”, $500 into your brand spanky new Adwords account. $200 a month on some tools to help with your keywords and ad generation. The top affiliate marketers say you need these so it’s an investment right? You are a money making machine and you’re about to rock the internet! Sleep is now for wimps, you spend 2 days creating tight keyword specific ad groups within Adwords, just like the experts tell you. You are pumping out landing page after landing page with “The Affiliate Theme”. You know you need to bid high and then drop it down later when you’ve got a good CTR, so that’s what you do – you set your initial bids at around the $1 mark and you wait….and wait.

Jump forward 48 hours – your Adwords bill is closing in rapidly on your $500 limit. You’ve got no conversions (on a product that you only earn $25 on anyway) and you’re left with the distinct feeling that you’ve been had. Feeling down you check around the blogosphere and find yet another article where a Super Affiliate boasts of making $20,000 yesterday! That my friend is how the majority of people go about starting affiliate marketing.

If that’s you, or if the thought of having to invest a few thousand dollars to “test the water” makes you want to be sick then I’ve got a new technique for you. It concentrates on making a profit with affiliate marketing first and foremost. Welcome to my 10 steps to making a profit with PPC affiliate marketing.

10 Steps To Low Risk High ROI Affiliate Marketing

1. Sign up with a few affiliate networks (MarketLeverage, PeerFly, NeverBlue etc)
2. Get yourself an advertiser account a 7search.com, deposit $25 – this is your only expense
3. Search your affiliate networks for low paying cost-per-lead offers (anything $1 – $5 is ideal)
4. Take what you would consider to be the primary keyword for your offer (e.g. for surveys – “Online Surveys“) and chuck it into your favourite keyword tool to get a list of related terms. Me, I use Market Samurai for this.
5. Create a new campaign in 7search.com for your offer
6. Google your offer and see how Adwords advertisers are advertising it, “borrow” an appropriate (top 4) advert and use it in 7search.com
7. Direct link your advert to your offer, no need for landing pages here
8. Import your keywords from step 4, remove any that are too broad (e.g. survey) – Set a default CPC of $0.05
9. Set a daily limit of $5 for your campaign (I’ve never hit my limit yet) .
10. If your campaign isn’t converting and giving a profit within a few days rinse/repeat with a different offer

That’s it. I’m not going to say that you’re going to get rich but it will give you a great chance of making a profit from affiliate marketing with little initial expenditure and risk. Of course once you’ve gained enough confidence in 7search.com there is nothing to stop you doing all the optimisation that you’ve read about. Bigger bids for higher value conversions would be the obvious step. Whilst 7search.com can’t deliver the volume that Adwords does there is nothing to stop you getting the volume by advertising every product that interests you! The important thing is it’s traffic that will convert.

Proof

One campaign for last week – Costs $4.70 Income $10.50 Profit $5.80 (more than a 100% ROI)

Was it a fluke? Another campaign from last week:-
Costs $4.50 Income $15 Profit $11.50 (more than a 100% ROI)

Like I said, it’s not going to make you rich but how many affiliate marketers are there out there who would just love to make a profit, or even for that matter just that first conversion without spending a fortune? Walk before you run springs to mind.

Paul B

13 Responses to “How To Start Making A PROFIT With Affiliate Marketing”

MLDina April 27, 2009

Thanks for the mention. Search and PPC can be tough to start with, but there’s definitely money to be made!
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Article publisher May 6, 2009

What a breathe of fresh air . Finally someone saying the truth about those idiotic claims made of making 10,000 dollars a day and you need this and that. Sounds like a good strategy you have here. What people don’t understand about being in business is that you will have expenses and your first job is to break even then once you do that, you scale it to make a profit. You don’t need a $37 e book to know this.
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Vic-BusinessAccent May 9, 2009

Hi Paul,

This is a timely information that I need since I’m still on the stage of studying how the affiliate marketing is running.
Thanks for this.
I gonna try the links you have provided above.

Vic-BusinessAccent’s last blog post..How to Get More Customers and Increase Your Sales
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Jami May 9, 2009

This entry alone makes your site more valuable than all the super affiliates combined.

The John Chow review was far too harsh.

“Branding” be damned. It’s the advice that matters in the end and THIS, my friend, is the best post I’ve read in months.

Jami’s last blog post..Flash from the past: September 13th, 2006
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Paul B May 10, 2009

It’s good to know that somebody appreciates the work that goes into the content
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