Compared to traditional advertising practices, affiliate programs are more effective, risk-free and cost-efficient. But why do many people still fail in affiliate marketing? There are a lot of reasons and a lot of areas in the program to look into. The most critical aspect in the affiliate program is advertising. Many affiliate marketers fail in this aspect because they don’t work hard enough. Although it pays to be lucky, you cannot merely rely on it. Affiliate marketing isn’t as simple as directing customers to the business site. If you want to earn big, of course, you have to invest time and a lot of hard work in promoting the products. As mentioned earlier, the competition is very high and customers nowadays are very wise, too. After all, who doesn’t want to get the best purchase—that is, to pay less and get more in terms of quantity and quality.

Lack of preparation is also a reason why one fails in affiliate marketing, whether he is a merchandiser or an affiliate. Part of the preparation is research. On the part of the merchant, he has to be highly selective in choosing the right affiliate websites for his affiliate program. In order to be sure he has the best choices, he must have exhausted his means in looking for highly interested affiliates whose sites are a sure fit to his products and services. The affiliates site visitors must match his targeted customers. On the other hand, the affiliate marketer must likewise research on the good-paying merchandisers before he signs up for an affiliate program. He must ensure that the merchants products and services match his interests so he can give his full attention and dedication to the program. He can get valuable information by joining affiliate forums, comparing different affiliate programs and reading articles on affiliate marketing where he can get tips from experienced affiliate marketers on how to choose the best merchants and products with high conversion rate.

The website is a very important tool in the whole affiliate program. As an affiliate marketer, you should plan how your site is going to be, from domain name to the design, the lay-out, the content, and ads. Some users are particular about what they see at first glance and thus if they find your site ugly, they won’t read through the content even if your site has great content. On the other hand, there are those who want information more than anything else. Affiliate marketers with “rich-content” web sites are usually the ones who prosper in this business because the content improves traffic to the site. Websites with high quality content with relevant keywords and more importantly, right information about the product and not empty hyped-up advertisements—allow you to earn big in affiliate marketing even when you’re asleep. If you can’t sustain the interest of your site visitors, you won’t be able to lead them to the merchant’s site. No click-through means no sale and thus, no income on your part.

Selecting a top level domain name is also crucial to the success of the affiliate program. Lots of affiliate sites don’t appear in the search engine results because they are deemed by affiliate managers as personal sites. Major search engines and directories would think of your site as transient ones and thus, they won’t list it in the directory. Before you decide on the domain name, know first what you are going to promote. Many fail because their sites are not appropriately named, so even when they feature the exact products the customer is looking for, the customer might think the site is not relevant and thus, won’t enter the site.

Above all, an affiliate marketer must be willing to learn more. Certainly, there are still a lot of things to learn and so an affiliate marketer must continue to educate himself so he can improve his marketing strategies. Many fail because they don’t grow in the business and they are merely concerned about earning big quickly. If you want long-term and highly satisfactory results, take time to learn the ins and outs of the business. Continue to improve your knowledge especially with the basics in affiliate marketing ranging from advertising to programming, web page development, and search engine optimization techniques. Likewise, study the needs and wants of your site users and how different merchandisers compete with each other.

Keep on trying; don’t get disappointed if your first attempts don’t pay off. Thousands are attracted by the possibility of generating skyrocketing incomes through affiliate marketing and so they sign up in any affiliate program without carefully understanding every aspect of the business. When they don’t get instant results, they quit and sign up for another program and repeat the process of just copying links and referring them to others. When you sign up for an affiliate program, don’t expect to get rich in an instant. Work on your advertising strategies and be patient. You’ll never know how much you can get if you don’t persevere.

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Having a successful contest blog is not an easy thing to do. ContestBeat achieved this goal and it’s now in the TOP 10 of the contest niche.

But why contests? Are they any good? Yes they are. Case study: Domprofesor.com. Contests are great promotion methods. They increase traffic, links, rss readers and all stats in general. Before I started the contest I had 100 incoming links and 50+ RSS subscribers. After the contest I now have 250+ links and 300+ rss subscribers. So contests create awareness and build buzz. And in the long run it’s the best option.

Now you know what contests are all about, let me tell you more about ContestBeat. I chose CB because they had no fee for submitting a contest to them. Other contest sites that have CB’s coverage and viewers ask for a $10-$50 fee to post about your contest, while CB does it for free. Also what attracted me was the site’s design. Clean, crisp, big fonts, everything you need to make a site user friendly. And most of all, if you don’t know nothing about how to create a contest they have the greatest advice page, telling you all the right things and no bull.

So if you want more traffic, more buzz, more links and more subscribers, better start a contest instead of paying for any kind of advertising. And if you want to start a contest, better use ContestBeat.Com.

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3) Third place: winning a 6 month link to my blogroll is Betshopboy with this entry.

2) Second place: winning a site review is Contestbeat with this entry.

1) First place: winning an Archos 504 40GB Media Player or $200 is Rfidonline with this entry.

Blogroll link and review will appear on the site in about 2 days. First place winner will be contacted to choose his prize.

And to all those who entered but didn’t win, don’t worry guys, there’s a new contest coming up in a 2 weeks.

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This perception about bloggers that make loads of money is not completely true. Look at people like John Chow and Shoemoney. Because of people like them most people think that you can make a living from blogging. But the truth is JC and Shoe had some other sites before they started blogging. And most of their income is not from their blogging, it’s from the other sites. So if you see John Chow making $20,000 per month by blogging, you think that you can do it too. But the question is do you have $1,500 to pay for 3-4 paid reviews that will get your name out there? Do ya? And if you do, are yo willing to spend them on that? Do you have $80 to pay each month for private hosting (presuming that your blog will be famous and will have a large number of visitors)? People make money blogging by becoming a billboard, an interactive one. You create an image for yourself and for your blog, you make a statement, you become popular and only then advertisers will pile up to have their ads shown on your site and to promote their products. But becoming popular requires 2 things: 1) Lots of money or 2) A great idea - something that the world has never seen - and little money. However you try to do this you will still need money.

From my personal point of view. Blogging is the last thing to do if you wanna make money online. I own a real life shop, some affiliate marketing sites and this blog. Affiliate marketing earned me in 5 days what this blog earned me in a month (although the affilaite marketing sites needed advertising, while on the blog I didn’t spend anything).

So knowing this, If you had $5,000 would you invest it in a blog or in a real life business?

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As you may know 80% of social media readers DON’T read the post. They just read the title, the description and the COMMENTS. If they like the title and the description they will vote your post (most of the times without even reading the entire post). But how to use this to your advantage? EASY. Using social media comments will give you an unfair advantage over your competitors. You will get huge amounts of traffic because your site will be on the front page every time (well, sort of). But how is this done, I hear you ask.

First you find a Upcoming post that is going to be Popular (you can do that by sorting by most votes) and has a few comments (under 20). The post must be somehow related to what you are going to promote or else people will just ignore it (if it’s not related at all to the commented post, it will get buried, which, if it gets a large number of minus votes, it will also attract attention). So now the thing to do is PLACE A LINK TO YOUR SITE in your comment. The results are just amazing. If your comment is in the first 10, if the popular post gets 1000 views, your site (with the link in the comment) will get at least 700 views. Of course this can get you banned from sites like Digg if you do it to often and if your comment are really offtopic. But don’t worry, you can always create another account.

So with this in mind, you should think before you submit a post to Digg and it gets 7 diggs. Maybe you should just comment.

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• Keywords and Key Phrases: if your desired keyword has too many competitors or a high price there are 2 things you can do: 1) pay more to get seen or 2) be smarter than your competitors and pay less for the same results. Ok let’s be more specific and work with examples. Let’s say you want to advertise on of those $47 Money Making Programs, you can imagine that the competition is fierce. So first of all don’t use keywords, use key phrases. The reasons key phrases are more powerful than keywords is because the are more targeted. Imagine that keywords are like a shotgun that fires lots of projectiles but they spread while they travel more distance, while key phrases are like a sniper rifle - one shot, one kill, every shot hits it’s target. Back to our example, let’s say that your Money Making Program is for moms who stay at home. Using the keyword money your ad will appear whenever people search for anything containing money (bank money, spend money, how much money do I need to…, mortgages and stuff). And anyone who clicks on your ad coming from a search like this in just curious not interested. However if you use the key phrase “make money for home based moms” or something similar your ad will be highly targeted and whoever comes to your site through that ad is interested in what you are advertising.
• Keyword Typos. If you are advertising (like in the example above) for the keyword money the price will be really high. But you should take into consideration the fact that typos happen very often. But the price for the keywords moneu or monet are really low. When using typos as keyword make sure the letter that doesn’t belong there is placed near the correct letter on the keyboard.
• Negative Keywords. These are actually something good. Using phrases like “xOxOx is a scam“, “is xOxOx a scam?“, “xOxOx sucks” or “xOxOx doesn’t pay” will actually send more visitors to your site. This works because the people who search for things like this on the web are already aware of your program, they want to buy it, but they are not sure yet, they are a bit suspicious. But it costs way less than the original keyword and it will send buyers to your site.
• Ad Title. Using special characters in your ad title will make your ad special and it will get noticed faster. For example, we have the following ad titles: Make Money Online and >>Make Money Online<<. Which one will you click on??? The second one of course. You can use stuff like >><<, — –, oO Oo, it’s up to you.
• Ad Content. Make sure you use your keyword (in our case money or make money) in the ad content.
• Ad Content Again. Forget what you already know. They are all wrong. When it comes to AdWords ad, less content is more. How this works? AdWords provides you with 3 lines of text. If you can use only 1 text line (the middle one) to write your message your ad will get noticed, guaranteed. The blank space will get it noticed. Because everyone uses all the 3 lines your 1 line ad will pop into the eyes of any reader.
• Ad Placement. Again forget what you already know. You don’t want your ad to be first or second. Why not? Because you will get casual clicks, most of them coming from people who say “What’s this??? Hmmm, I’m going to click on it.” If your ad is 3rd or 4th this means that everyone who clicks on it is interested, because they are searching something and they are really SEARCHING for it even on lower spots.
• Landing Pages. Don’t start an ad campaign without a landing page (I will talk about landing pages later).

Now that is almost it. Maybe I forgot something, I don’t know. But the fact is I told you in a few words what a $47 ebook would tell you in 80 pages.

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They’re not angry, I was just kidding. But they are going for your server. Let’s say you have a site. 300-500 visitors per day. Someone submits one of your posts to let’s say Digg. And in 14 hours that post gets on the front page of Digg. That’s great news. That’s what you wanted. Tons of traffic to your site. This is what you wanted. But let’s think about it for a little. 500 visitors per day means about 21 visitors per hour which means 0,3 visitors per minute. That’s not going to kill your server, even if you are using free hosting. Now let’s imagine the Digg front page situation: 10,000 visitors in 24 hours means 416 visitors per hour which means 7 visitors per minute. But you won’t get 7 visitors each minute for 24 hours. The first 40-60 minutes are going to be crucial. Being on the first page of Digg you will get some 7 visitors per second. This is bad news. This is even worse if you use a database based publishing platform (like Wordpress). Because every time a someone visits your site your wordpress will have to contact the database and display some content. And if you take into consideration the fact that most $7 hosts allow only 10 simultaneous connections to the database (only 10 users at the same time) you will realize how wrong is this. Most hosts use settings like this not to break down the server. Because if you allow more than 10 connections your server will have to process a large amount of information in a fraction of a second and it will go down.

So before you even think about getting tons of visitors in an instant, you should think about handling them in some way. If you get your post on the front page of any social site and your site doesn’t work you will hate yourself (just like I did when it first happened to me). Use stuff like WP-Cache or similar (you’ll find more about this on Google). They work. Don’t think about switching hosts. Any $7 host will give you the same thing. If you want a host that can handle 7 visitors per second you’ll have to pay about $80/month (maybe less). And if you usually get 500 visitors per day you don’t want to pay $960 year for that.

So before getting a flood of traffic you should brace yourself, using simple and effective methods.

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Remember a few days ago I told you I got my hand on some of those miraculous eBooks that tell you SECRETS and stuff you would kill for (all for $49,99). I have some 75 eBooks and they are all CRAP, all of them. I read about 30 of them and I now consider myself as stupid as I was before. Not only there was nothing new in those eBooks, but some of them contained literally no information at all. It was just crap. I also got on of those TRAFFIC eBOOKS about how to get more traffic to your website. And now I am writing about it because yesterday I saw and ad for that particular eBook that said:

“No visitors on your website??? Get tons of traffic today!”

I won’t give names but what you are going to read next will be as funny as hell. The first thing you must know is that this eBook costs $97 or $47 (depends who is selling it - because there are some resell/rebranding rights). The eBooks in very short - I don’t like looong thing to read, I like step-by-step stuff, easy to read, clear and concise, that tell you exactly what to do. So I was thinking I finally found something here. But I WAS WRONG. I WAS SOOOO WRONG. Here is basically what the Ebook was all about:

1. Download some CRAZY BROWSER and then join some TRAFFIC EXCANGE/AUTOSURF sites (that’s just smart, I didn’t see that coming). Then you read more about how to use the autosurf sites and the browser you just downloaded. And of course all the links to the traffic exchange sites and to the browser download are all affiliate links (hidden of course).
2. The next thing the program tells us we need is a huge subscriber list. To do that we
   are going to need an autoresponder (that the eBook provides of course, with an affiliate link of course). Now the next phrase made me lol just like a lolcat: “Not sure what to promote to your huge subscriber list? Here are some great programs…” After that there are some links to some other $49,99 crappy eBooks, affiliate links of course.
3. Step 3 consists in signing up to some free hosting services (affil links here too). After signing to that free hosting service you’ll need to create an AMAZING TRAFFIC FORMULA PAGE (???WTF???) - all details are inside.
4. And finally a SECRET that will send targeted visitors to your site immediately - and you are so lucky because this is an INVITATION ONLY and you have an invitation. After sending the invitation code you get the link where you can download the TRAFFIC SECRET: THE TRAFFIC TOOLBAR aka SPYWARE.
5. Finally there are of course some other bonuses: more $49,99 affiliate programs that you can(not) make money from.

And that was it. The conclusion we can draw is:

YOU PAY $47 FOR LEARNING THAT:

• You can get traffic by using traffic exchange/autosurf sites (DOH). Awesome dude, I didn’t know that !!! LOL.
• This is not a scam, is says traffic and it gives you traffic. However traffic is nothing, you need readers. If you wanna make money from this you will need clicks on your site, and traffic alone won’t get you clicks. Only visitors will get you clicks.
• Getting some free affiliate links for $47 is a deal that rocks. Awesome dude. LOL again.
• Getting spyware for $47 is also a great deal. Spyware is way more expensive than that. ROFL.
• You know where the huge number of crappy eBooks come from: the same place, because they are all the same.

So my final advice… Don’t buy crap, use your common sense. No one is going to sell you $1000 worth of product for only $47. NO ONE.

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But advertising won’t tell you this. Advertising won’t tell you the site you are about to buy is really only a template (which you can also get for free). Because the main principle of advertising is to be misleading. They don’t say get a TEMPLATE in 30 seconds. They say get a site in 30 seconds because it will give you the impression that they are offering so much more. Everybody offers templates, but how offers a full site?

And what about those web hosting ads. Only $2,99/month. You’ll be thinking “Great, I’m gonna pay $6 for 2 months and if the site is working out I’ll get more“. But this is misleading again. Because most web hosting providers won’t allow you to buy just a month of hosting. You will have to buy at least 1 year so I don’t see why (I’m just kidding) they advertise their price like this. But of course, instead of saying $36/year it’s better to say $3/month. I wonder why they don’t say just 10 cents/day - that would be even better.

My conclusion is that advertising doesn’t sell products (contrary to popular belief), the product sells itself. Advertising just leads to the product. If the product isn’t good enough it won’t sell no matter how much advertising it gets. So if you have a product you want to sell and you want to advertise it, try to squeeze the most out of your ad. Use whatever you need to get that lead to your product. That’s why you see all those ads saying “make $3000/day - no experience required“. That’s just something to get you interested, coz the product will be crap.

It doesn’t pay to be a saint in a world full of whores.

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