Affiliate Marketing: A Cynical View

This site, like the others I've joined, offer tracking tools. A quick look at the dashboard reveals how many visits your article, lens, or blog has had. These statistics are purdy dern important, cowboy! And not just because they make you feel good. (Or bad, if your views are as dismal as mine are right now, since I'm not actively promoting much. Yet.)

They're important because they allow you to calculate the value of your pages.

If you've had 1,000 visits to a page, and you earned $18.43 from your page, your page is worth just under two cents per view. I'm going to come back to this point, but for now, let's just say you're going to need a whole heckuva lot of views if you ever plan on leaving your day job!

My research has shown me two suggestions that are repeated over and over again:

1. Research keywords.

2. Promote your site constantly.

Now, I've been likened to a burr under a cowboy's saddle more than once in my lifetime, and what I'm fixin' to say might make a feller mad, but I'm just gonna spit it out anyway. Some of that well-intended advice ain't worth more than a cow patty. Lemme take off this here ten gallon hat that has my typin' funny and we'll talk about why this greenhorn's ignoring important advice from seasoned veterans.

As I was saying, there are two pieces of advice I've seen repeatedly. Neither of them in bad advice, but they're not great advice either.

The first one, researching keywords, gives a blogger tools to evaluate how difficult it will be to gain ranking. Using Google's Keyword Tool will provide statistics about how many global or local searches people conducted for phrases like "make money online" or "work from home." In this case, those and similar phrases had about a million searches, give or take, in the last thirty days. By directing my browser to Google, I discover that searching for those phrases right now results in a couple hundred million sites that ranked for those terms in the last thirty days. UGH!

If you haven't already downloaded THE Squidoo Step By Step Guidebook it gives an amazing example of how one outstanding blogger has used this tool to hone her article in such a way that she was able to get her page ranked #1 on Google.

"So what's the problem?" you may be thinking.

The problem is that this process eats up a lot of time when you're not already writing. Consider the math for a moment. Let's say you actually earn $.50 for every click through to Google ads and you're making 8% from Amazon links on your page - and it just so happens you're advertising products that are $100 each. You have enthusiastic readers who want to buy, so 10% of them trigger a payout (half to Google and half to Amazon products). If you have 1000 visits to your page per day, ten people will have purchased. You'd have earned $2.50 from Google ads and $80 from Amazon's affiliate program. Over an entire month, you'd have pocketed $75 from Google affiliate ads, and $1,200 from Amazon.

Ahem, where'd I lay my head bucket? Ah, there it is.

Well, you see, as an online greenhorn m'self, seein' as how I got a fancy piece of paper for public relations and marketing, I'm still seeing plenty of opportunity. Here's what I'm looking at doing as I hit the trail:

- Set realistic, achievable goals.

- Use affiliate marketing by working smarter, not harder.

- Sell my own product, which at the moment is freelance writing. (I have bigger plans on the horizon, mind ye!)

- Promote sensibly and inexpensively (that's a four letter word that's spelled F-R-E-E!)

If you care to join me on my adventure, please keep an eye on these pages. I'll be sharing useful tips on down the road. Of course, my best secrets ain't available to just anyone. If you want to get the real low-down at the showdown, shoot me a message with your request to be on my e-mail list. When you do, tell me about what's working and not working for you.

If you'd rather not wait around this ol' watering hole, click this link for a $1 introductory offer from "Blogging to the Bank."

Until we meet again....

Thanks for stopping by and reading. An extra thanks to the folks who have helped boost readership:

KonaGirl
Writer Janis