Grab High Performance Affiliate Marketing now, just in case he changes his mind!

[Update]: I was wrong, it’s completely free! You don’t even have to sign up to the newsletter. It’s still worth it, but not required. Very nice.

Technorati Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Quit Your Day Job

Ben left out a little bit of history when describing what happened during the gold rush. Most prospectors didn’t get rich from finding gold. These people often sold everything they had to move out to California to prospect. Nearly 300,000 people rushed into the area in search of riches promised by large veins of gold discovered there. But the smart money wasn’t on the gold at all, it was on the prospectors themselves. The people who cleaned up and made the real money are those forward thinking folks who sold the prospectors their gear. They sold them pans, picks and all the tackle they would need to go out and prospect. Most of which they’d have to buy more than once as they broke, lost or had theirs stolen. As more prospectors showed up, so did more merchants, ready to peddle their wares to the new settlers of California. Between the rising cost of living, equipment and goods offered, the people mining the gold were just handing it over to the people who saw the opportunity to market to a captive market. In short, the people mining gold did all the work while merchants simply sold their wares from the comfort of their shops. There were exceptions, of course. There are always a handful of savvy business people in any group, and the prospectors had their share as well. Eventually, though, only large groups with money and equipment would be able to get at the valuable ore.

In terms of blogging or doing business online, that gold rush is still happening. The people making the most money aren’t those building sites, but the people catering to them. Offering them advice, hosting, programs, ebooks, seo, consulting… the list goes on and on. Like with the gold rush, there are obviously people creating web sites and making money, but like so many other industries, it’s the feeders, as I like to call them, who are really raking in the cash. One great example is the ‘writing’ industry. There is no shortage of business that cater just to writers, everything from professional copy editors (a good thing) to people who will be happy to charge you to publish your book (a very bad thing). There are even scams, like poetry.com, who will publish every single poem submitted and sell you an author copy for a nice sum of money. They know that the writer is going to buy a handful to pass around to friends. They aren’t targeting readers, they are going directly after the writer!

My point, before I get too lost, is that if you can find a way to service a niche you may be able to make more money than if you were publishing in that niche. Something to think about when you’re cooking up ways to make more money online. Anyone out there with a site need a consultant? I’m kidding. Unless you do need someone.

Technorati Tags: Making Money, Consulting, Gold Rush, Marketing

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I also read a few affiliate blogs, like Shawn Collins. Aside from some good and some not-so good ebooks, does anyone have any recommended reading on affiliate marketing. I think I know enough about the process to get crackin but I’d still love to keep researching and learning. So if you’ve got a great spot for affiliates, drop me a link.

High Performance Affiliate Marketing may be the first ebook I’ve read that I actually felt like I learned something from. It’s not high level, it’s not rocket science, but it is full of solid advice and useful information. The section on setting up a PPC campaign would have been worth the price alone. While you won’t learn any secret forumla for affiliate success, you will gain a good understanding of how things work.

One of my favorite things about the book was how honest and upfront Jeremy was. He flat out tells you that this isn’t a short cut to riches, just like anything that’s worth doing, it takes hard work. But, if you stick with it and make it work, then you’ll end up doing less work than you would if you had a regular job.

When and If Jeremy start selling the book again, you can be sure I’ll be signing up as an affiliate. If you can get a copy from somewhere, do it. It’s worth it.

I do want to try my hand at some affiliate sites. While any site can sell a product, I’m talking about building a site around a product. I know people out there doing it but most people don’t post examples. If you’ve every done any amount of research into affiliate marketing you’ll no doubt end up at Clickbank. I know a lot of people swear by it but if I see one more “make money at insert keyword here” ebook I may be sick. The worst part about affiliate marketing is all the people trying to fleece new people by selling affiliate marketing itself! If you can sell them, more power to you. I’ll tell you what you need to know about affiliate marking right now. Find a great product that people want and sell it. It’s not magical, it’s not mystical and it’s not hard. The hard part is the same thing that’s hard about any site – getting visitors to it and getting them to take the desired action. I’m not sure I’ve found the right product to start my first real affiliate site, but I accidentally sold a big screen TV through amazon for a $49 commission and so LCD/HDTV’s are sounding pretty good! I know it’s way to late to think about affiliate marketing for this holiday season, but I’m already thinking about next year.

Aside from affiliate marketing, I’ve got ideas for sites like TV Forums and a re-launch of Readers Unbound. Both would be forum/community driven sites and RU would eventually have some cool features like your own book collections, reviews, etc. When deciding what to do I have to ask myself: “Is what I’m doing adding moving me towards my goal?” The answer is often no. I love doing cool little projects, helping just about anyone who asks and doing any number of things that don’t really move me towards my goal. While some of these ideas could help in some ways (link strategy, raising my visibility, etc.) the bottom line is building traffic and monetizing that traffic. So, with that in mind it’s time to decide what project is next up on my list. I’m leaning towards two product/deal type sites. One for gadgets, tech etc. and the other for women which my wife Aeryn would be writing. There is a ton of potential even if these markets are competitive. I just want to see if they work at all and learn from them and apply the concept to tighter, less saturated niches.

Within the next week or two I should be ready to launch one or both of these and I’ll make sure to point them out. During the downtime today I need to go through Azoogle and check out some of their offers. I’ve been seeing really good stuff from them.

• You don’t pay any extra. You get to shop a top stores that you know and love like Amazon, Buy.com, Target, etc. and you get the same prices you normally would.
• You get to pick the charity! Maatiam has over 800,000 charities to choose from so you should be able to find one that works for you.

The way this works is pretty slick. The reason you don’t have to pay extra is that Maatiam has signed up to the affiliate programs for all these retailers and gets paid a commission on everything people buy. Maatiam donates approximately 7% of the sales to the charity of your choice keeping only about 3% for costs and overhead.

While this is slightly off topic here I think it’s a great cause and a great example of how to use the Internet and the affiliate marketing concept to do something that can have an impact on real peoples lives. I’m about to start doing the online portion of my Christmas shopping and I plan on using Maatiam.

I know what I’d be doing if I had my site up already.

• Make sure all my sites were up, responding and all affiliate links were working!
• Make sure popular items this season were featured promenantly
• List special deals such as coupons, free shipping, bonus items etc.
• Email my “list” to make sure they know about the sales and link to specific hot deals
• Offer shopping tips for getting the items you want for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday
• Update frequently to keep them coming back.

And I’m sure there are tons of other great tips. Do you have an affiliate site of any kind? What are you doing to get ready?