I have made no secret of the fact that Amazon accounts for a pretty significant chunk of my earnings as an affiliate marketer. I have had one blog post generate over $2000.00 in a single month when that post went viral. During the ‘Back to School’ season I can easily rake in an extra $1000 or more from one or two posts on my blogs about school supplies. I have the same success during Christmas as well, in regards to green Christmas gifts. Even during non-seasonal times I make a very nice amount each and every month from Amazon… enough usually for my rent and all my utilities.

I never had a guide to help me make Amazon sales, I just learned via trial and error. The first two quarters I was promoting Amazon products I earned whopping 7 dollars and some change. I also used the same tracking IDs on all my sites so when I did start making sales… I had no idea where they were coming from. But nowadays, newbies to Amazon don’t have to take a shot in the dark. They can get step by step instructions for Amazon success.

One of my two favorite guides is Info Product Killer. In my review I mention two ways I implemented the ideas found in this book and I shared the results with exact dollar amounts. I followed up the next year with this post. The pages, sites, and Squidoo lenses I made using IPK strategies are STILL making money so that is a great testimony for how well it works.

My second fave Amazon sales resource is new but oh so very valuable. It is called Amazonian Profit Plan and it was created by two Aussie affiliate marketing women who started a small network of niche affiliate sites together and they are now making over $10,000 a month from Amazon. The book outlines how to craft Amazon product reviews that will sell and then how to drive traffic to those pages. The key to their success seems to be the criteria they use to select the products, the way they craft the reviews to make them valuable to the reader, and the formula they use to drive traffic to those reviews. I realize my Amazon success has been very much a fly by night operation so it fascinates me when people create success with methodical, calculated formulas.

This book teaches you:

• How to choose the right Amazon products
• How to determine what keywords and keyword phrases you should target
• How to spy on your current competition and beat them on the SERPs (search engine results page)
• How to drive traffic to your reviews and get inbound links

Once you use the formula and start seeing traffic and sales you rinse and repeat with new products (the book suggests only 5 at a time). I REALLY like this formula because it is actionable and broken down into easy to follow steps. I have no doubt that anyone who took this much time to create such an action plan DID in fact see amazing results.

Both IPK and Amazonian Profit Plan are wonderful products and methods. I doubt I will follow either exactly as described but I take the most valuable tips and insights and put them into place when I have the time. I say this only because my fly by night method leaves me with loads of free time and almost nothing on my “To Do” list… which is highly valuable to me… but $10,000 a month from Amazon??? Hmm… I might have to rethink that one!

I was reading my review of 2008 this morning and had a few thoughts. I started out 2009 all gung ho and really didn’t end up doing as much as I wanted to. 2008 was really the year I found out what worked and where I needed to go but all in all 2009 was not as big of a growth year for my business as it could have been.

My income went up by 30% yes but not because I did very much that was new… older projects and web sites just had time to marinate and get better with age. I did not not add any new info products to my line up.. I just have the three ebooks and they continue to amaze me with steady sales. I still giggle when I think how I hoped the sales would at LEAST be able to pay for the shopping cart I use to sell them. Those books were one of the single best things I ever did business-wise.

I guess a big part of why I didn’t really reach all of my goals would be because we moved to a new town. Our expenses doubled and it made us more reliant on my income for mundane things like bills. Instead of spending time dabbling in new income streams I had to stick with what I knew would pay the rent. I also moved away from my extended family and starting spending nearly every weekend traveling back to see them.. that took 3 days off my normal work week… since I usually do work (a least a little) every day.

But I did accomplish some new things. I added a new niche site that did really well. During the peak for that niche I earned $450 a month from that one site. In off peak months it makes anywhere from $20-$60 so I am really happy with it and have already added a similar site that was earning money from the first week.

I also revamped my Squidoo efforts. At one point early in the year I got discouraged with my Squidoo earnings and I sold off half of my lenses. Then a few months later I got an invite to an exclusive group within Squidoo called Rocket Moms. It was basically a group project to give Squid moms a special place to house their lenses and encourage them to make more. I made some new lenses during the Rocket Moms challenges and they started to do pretty good. I decided to try and become a Giant Squid… which meant I had to have at least 50 quality lenses. I bought about 10 lenses and reworked them and I made the rest.. about 30 in all! Anyway I am a Giant Squid now and I am working my way to the Giant 100 club.. I have about 70ish lenses right now. I am making MUCH better money than before and my lenses direct traffic to my other blogs. I am a happy Squid.

Now at about 6 months or so into our new house I am finally getting down to business with new growth projects… better late than never right? Last year I bought a site for $500 and pretty much just sat on it. I re-did the design and added articles sporadically but that’s about it. Even with that teeny bit of attention though it has earned a modest amount of money via affiliate sales and the list attached to it is over 2000 strong. This past month I converted it to a blog and I hope to dedicate as much time to it as I have my other blog. It has the potential to be just as big, if not bigger… I feel it in my bones.

I also created a couple new blogs in an entertainment niche that I am passionate about. I finally made that leap after I started to see how well my Squidoo lenses on those topics were doing. Squidoo is an excellent place for market research too!

My love of seasonal affiliate sales has only grown as well. In addition to having another great xmas season, I also had a great Halloween, and a great back to school season.

Going into 2009 I know that I need to take some risks and work a whole lot harder if I want to double my income again. I plan to create a new ebook and have the topic picked and the cover designed… I just need to write the book! I am going to really focus on blogging for 6 blogs… 3 in the natural niche I love and 3 in the entertainment niche I love. I want to add a few more static product sites since those have performed really well for me. I have big goals again this year but let’s see if I can generate the steam to see them through.

I have said it before but it warrants a few more shouts… I LOVE seasonal affiliate sales! Well I love all affiliate sales but seasonal affiliate sales provide a huge boost in earnings a few times a year.

The back to school season is a big seasonal earner for me. I would guesstimate that I made AT LEAST an extra $1000 from late July to mid September. I celebrated by buying myself a new camera lens for my DSLR.

I also see increases during Halloween and Christmas, especially the latter. Remember my review of Info Product Killer last year? It teaches you how to create niche web sites, especially Christmas sites. I used the information to create one niche toy site and a Christmas gift guide on an existing site. Today I ran a couple reports to see how much I earned from these in total. I earned $122.52 from the Wall-e site and $804.55 from the gift guide. Since it only took me 5 hours to put them together I earned $185 per hour. Not bad! I Paid for a domain and the Info Product Killer product and made an $840 profit. Again.. not bad! It can pay to invest in quality learning materials. And remember this was in additition to the monthly income I usually bring in… it was a BONUS.

I really want to get on the ball and make a few more this year. Unfortunately, it is hard for me to be inspired by products I wouldn’t buy or use myself. Somehow I don’t see making dozens but that’s okay. AND instead of making whole sites I can take a shortcut and create a Squidoo page.. they do really well seasonally too. I am already seeing my monthly lens earnings go up.

I did a little research for this year and found one of the HOT toys for xmas 2009 will be the Twilight Barbie Dolls, so I threw together a site for them in less than an hour. Then I put together a quickie Squidoo page, and linked to the new site from a few existing ones. I may try to get an article or two up at ezine articles as well. So I am off to a running start and I love the product too. Now I just need to find the inspiration to make a few more, update my ones from last year, and I will be set to make a nice chunk of change again this Christmas…

Kelly at Sparkplugging has asked people to participate in a meme and “Spark an Idea About Something You Want So Bad You Can Taste It”.

I have something I want so bad I can taste it…

My goal is to be able to travel with my folks when they retire in a couple years. They want the kids and I to spend summers with them in various parts of the country and world and I want to be able to do that with them. I need to be making enough in income and have enough saved to pay for extended travel for months at a time basically. I also want to be able to take a couple 4-7 day cruises each year. Add heck I have to be able to spend time my brother and nephews who will be moving to Indonesia in a couple months. AND I have to be able to afford to offset my travel (carbon) emissions in some way so that is an extra expense.

When I look at what I REALLY want… it is to travel and I used to be quite the jet setter until my second child was born. Always has been and always will be what I want most in life… it is about time I start making that happen again.

My goals this year are to get a rewards credit card and start paying all my bills with it so I get airline miles BUT I will pay off the card with my debit card immediately so I don’t ever carry a balance. I will also be opening an ING account so I can start adding to a travel fund. I plan to create more niche sites since I am doing so well with the ones I have now… passive income rocks. I also plan to add two more info products to my line up since those too perform fantastically for me. I would love to find a way to make money off my photography too…

I figure I need to be making about $1000-1500 more a month to be able to do this AND keep paying my bills at home. This amount is VERY achievable so I need to get on it….

Are you an affiliate marketer? If so, you need to be aware that state governments are enacting legislation that could effectively kill your business. I am greatly concerned about this since I would say 50% or more of my monthly income stems from affiliate sales.

As an affiliate I post links and banner advertisements on my sites to Amazon and various other online companies. I send them traffic and potential sales and when a sale is made, they in turn pay me a commission… anywhere from 4% to 75% depending on the company and product. I get a big fat check every month from Amazon and smaller but still very nice checks form a host of other places. But my profession as an affiliate marketer is under attack in many states and sadly many affiliate marketers just got the axe.

First some background though. Online stores like Amazon, Zappos, or Barnes and Noble are only required by law to collect sales taxes in the states where their company resides. That is their tax “nexus”. If they are based in Idaho for example then they only have to collect sales taxes on purchases made by people in Idaho. Sales from Ohio would fall outside their tax nexus and they would not be required to collect sales taxes on those purchases. For years, states have been looking for a way to to get those taxes and the new economic crisis has given them the incentive to try and do it. Unfortunately for affiliate marketers they have decided to use us as the means to do this.

New York and North Carolina recently passed legislation that identifies affiliate relationships as something similar to an employee relationship. Using this logic North Carolina and New York can now require online companies to collect state sales based on the fact that they have “employees” (affiliates) in those states. Well, these companies are not stupid… they saw that they were being railroaded into a new tax nexus by way of their affiliate relationships and in response they are simply firing their affiliates and avoiding the taxes. They avoid a new tax nexus and affiliate marketers in those states are essentially without a job anymore.

Yesterday Amazon.com fired 1000 affiliates in North Carolina. Termination letters have been sent to affiliates in Hawaii from Zappos, Amazon, Endless and several other smaller merchants. This may very well be the sole source of income for these people and now due to a poorly written law they have no income anymore AND the companies avoid paying the taxes anyway. The affiliates lose, the states lose (the sales taxes AND your income taxes), and the companies go on with business as usual. Half a dozen other states are poised to pass similar legislation.

I am simply horrified that these laws are being passed and I am so sorry for affiliate marketers living in these states. I know several affiliate marketers that live in Hawaii and they can only afford to live their because they work online as affiliate marketers. Local jobs are almost non existent in their areas.

If you make any money from affiliate marketing, if you work online, or if you just hoped to make money affiliate marketing some day then you need to write the legislators behind these awful bills. Affiliates are not employees, they are advertisers. Does contracting with a radio station to buy advertising make them your employee? Heck no! The affiliate marketing profession is being used as a weapon to collect state revenue and we will be the ones hurt.

Talk about it, blog about it… we need to stop this before more states adopt it and affiliate marketing is dealt a death blow.

And now more then ever we should all find ways to diversify our income so that if this law passes in our state it will not leave us without any income.

Visit the Performance Marketing Alliance for details.

I think all to often we see articles and advice that you can make money blogging but then when moms go out and try it they may  only sew a few dollars trickle in. They get discouraged and they think they have been duped or that it is a matter of luck. Some quit blogging and others continue but are highly dubious of the moms who “claim” to make real money. I know I felt that way at one time. I saw Internet Marketers online claiming to make upwards of 5-10 grand a month and when I managed to squeak by with only $50 after busting my butt behind the screen…I was skeptical.

I am not skeptical any more but I am realistic. Some of the figures floating around are not going to be within the reach of the average blogger. Much of it is about having the right niche at the right time. Much of it is about having the right voice and the right writing style. BUT much of it is still about working hard, finding a unique voice and site, testing and tracking your efforts, and always looking for ways to put your content in front of more and more eyes.

I saw this article online today that addresses a WSJ claim that bloggers who have 100,000 uniques per month make on average $75,000. In my personal opinion that figure is crap. I am sure some do make that much but they must have a super hot niche with hot affiliate products to promote. That just cannot be the “average” IMO. I had 88,000 uniques to just ONE of my sites last month and that would theoretically make me $66,000 richer this month. Yeah… that didn’t happen. If that HAD happened I would be blogging right know from my villa in Tuscany or my condo in Costa Rica.

So how can you gauge the amount of money you can potentially make? Heck if I know!

Well, actually I saw a much better model on Frederic Patenaude’s site a few weeks back. I like Frederic because he makes a very good living online in the raw foods niche. He also does some business to business stuff but mostly I see him promoting health and information products so he is closer to my “niche” than a guy who promotes IM stuff. The IM niche (Internet Marketing) model is not very relevant to me and what I do.

Anyway in his graph, in the video on that page, you see the general figures you can make depending on the size of your list. He claims that if you have 3000 readers you can make about $1500-3000 per month. For 5000 readers the number is $2500-5000 and for 10,000 readers the figure is $5000-10,000.

I really like this chart but that may be because I have had results that mesh with it. My list number and monthly income falls within the second tier and I DO see gains when my reader numbers go up. For me the key is having regular readers and also still having that search engine traffic that comes from relevant, focused, content. Those visitors don’t always subscribe but they DO buy and they do increase ad network revenues.

So overall I find it better to work on building your lists (subscribers) rather than just trying to drum up high traffic numbers. The money is in the list.

To get around a lack of quality promotion materials or the fact that I am using an indirect affiliate service like Amazon I have started to use my own affiliate banners.  They look good and they are unique to me so my visitors know I REALLY DO like these products. Here are some examples I just started using last month.

If you want to make money with your blog eventually you will likely consider joining an ad network. They basically act as a broker for advertising and their large reach and network of bloggers makes it easier for them to contract with big name advertisers. You devote a spot on your blog, usually a  top position for their ad code and whenever they sign new advertisers they automatically show up on your blog and you get paid on a CPM basis. The ad network does all the work finding advertisers and collecting the money. This makes it easier for YOU to make money selling ads. But is it always peachy working with ad networks? In one word, NO.

Foe one thing, joining an ad network typically changes the way you blog. Many bloggers start out using full RSS feeds where their readers can read all the content in their feed readers. But no money can be made from ad impressions by doing that so bloggers will usually opt to use summary feeds and make their readers click on over to the actual web site. Readers may get annoyed and they may stop reading. At the very least you may have fewer actual readers since you only have a title and a short summary to catch their attention.

Ad networks may also contract with advertisers you and your audience do not approve of. While most networks allow you to opt out of certain campaigns some can get by you and it is highly embarrassing to have junk food ads displaying on a  healthy eating blog, for instance.

Ad networks are also getting more and more picky about your content. A large network that I use recently added a bunch of new rules for their bloggers. You have to post at least once a week, you cannot review products given to you by a company that are valued at over $40, and you cannot do a company sponsored giveaway of any kind. Another ad network disqualifies any social media traffic, like referrals from Stumbleupon or Digg.

More and more it seems that companies wanting to buy ad space on blogs do not want compete with your other money making ventures. They do not want their ad next to giveaway for another company or a review of another product. They want their ad next to a rant about potty training or your latest garden produce…safe posts that will not detract from their banner ad. Frankly it is getting rather annoying.

The network I mentioned earlier decided that you could do reviews and giveaways if you put them on a page that had none of their ads. This required you to make a custom template and relegate your content to a static page where it would not appear with your other posts or be picked up in your RSS feed.

Thanks to help from the lovely Lynette at Mom Masterminds I was able to create a custom “post” template so that I could post giveaways and sponsored reviews in a special category that would not display ads. It is a great solution for me and allowed me to keep working with this ad network. Otherwise I would have kicked them to the curb for trying to dictate the terms under which I run my business…blogging IS a business for me and the other ways I make money are none of their concern.

So if you are considering joining and ad network look closely at their policies and see if the advantages are truly worth it. And if you do decide that the money is worth the aggravation, join up with Mom Masterminds as they ALWAYS help me find tech solutions when I need them and it is all part of the membership!

There are two main ways that a site visitor can subscribe to your web site/blog or your “feed”.  They can subscribe by adding it to their feed reader or they can subscribe by email. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

Personally I choose to subscribe to my favorite sites using a feed reader. My personal favorite is the built-in Internet Explorer feed reader. Most of my own readers also subscribe via feed reader. I do have the option though for email subscriptions. Some people like to be notified of new content with an email either daily or weekly. Others, like me, may subscribe to so many RSS feeds that they would be bombarded with emails. I like to read on my own time.

But it is still important to let your visitors choose for themselves. You can allow for email subscriptions through services like Feedburner or FeedBlitz. I chose Aweber to manage my RSS email subscriptions because it allowed for many options that other places didn’t offer and it has ended up being a very savvy way to market to my readers. For one monthly price I can host as many newsletters and feeds as I want so if you have more than one site…Aweber is awesome.

When my readers subscribe via RSS they get an email about once a week with links to all the content for that week. I set it up to look like a newsletter rather than a random group of links so that I can get my affiliate links in front of more eyeballs each week. My main blog has about 1400 email subscribers and this is what they see every week. It matches my web site colors, it links to new and fresh content, and it has affiliate links or text link ads from advertisers. Ever since I switched to this format for email subscribers I have had better retention rates and more sales. Even if MOST people like feed readers it is just silly to let pass an opportunity to email your readers directly on a regular basis.

When I first started an online business five years ago I imagined that I would profit by selling my own products and by selling advertising on my web sites. I knew that I did not want to offer services like coaching, admin help, or design. I was a VA for while until I decided that it was time to put all the light night hours and effort into my own business, not someone else’s.

I quickly found that selling my own physical products was too demanding of my time. Selling my own info products was hard too because I needed to come up with good ideas and at the time I was short on ideas. What I didn’t “get” was that I didn’t have to come up with the ideas but eventually I did catch on. I decided to try my hand at this affiliate marketing “stuff” I was hearing about. I joined a couple programs and added a few links to my sites. For months I earned nothing and I was just about ready to call it quits on that experiment when I decided to send an email to my small list and include an affiliate link. Immediately I got a few sales. They were really small sales that only brought in about $3 each but it was progress. The best part was that this money was completely passive and this was the biggest perk for me because even securing advertisers was too hands on for me.

I joined other relevant programs, added more links to my sites and slowly but surely I was seeing some money every month. I knew that the niche I had chosen for my web site was severely limiting the type of affiliate programs I could work with though, so I decided to start another web site. This one ended up being my cash cow and right from the start my MAIN objective was to bring in affiliate income.

There was just no need to create my own products when I could sell other people’s products and let them do all the hard work. Of course now I DO have my own products but I am still an affiliate marketer first and foremost.

This week one of the BEST and brightest affiliate marketers on the net has opened a new affiliate marketing membership site called Affiliatenaire. Jimmy knows affiliate marketing and has a reputation for selling thousands of products and memberships in days. Everyone knows that when he sells something it is the gold standard…the real deal. Perhaps they are like me and are also enthralled with his mesmerizing Matthew McConaughey voice, hehe.

I have no doubt that Affiliatenaire will sell out quickly (just like Membernaire did) as he is only offering 1000 spots. The program is an an intensive monthly course on affiliate marketing. You get one lesson each week and if you act on everything he gives, you can start building an affiliate marketing empire in only 2-3 hours a week.

This course would be great for beginners but even better for people who are using affiliate marketing techniques already and want to use some of the tactics the pros do. I plan on doing the full course myself as I have never joined one of Jimmy’s programs or bought one of his reports and NOT learned some amazing new things. The first lesson is over 20 pages long and is really good stuff.

With the economy the way it is I know I am trying to secure as many sources of income as possible. I need to get creative and diversify even more to protect what I have worked so hard to build. Here is to another great year in online business!

Check out Affiliatenaire for yourself…