Affiliate Marketing (AM)

PHOTO SOURCE: ShoeMoney AdSense Check

That photo isn't me, and I look nothing like this guy, but he's one of my inspirations. He's Jeremy Shoemaker and he is now a multi-millionaire from Affiliate Marketing, or AM. You see, as a PHP freelancer, I needed to hedge my bets. I need something easy that generates income while I sleep, and I need to continue to broaden my horizons seeking any work I can from the Internet, hopefully in something that I'm skilled enough to handle.

I heard about a forum site called wickedfire.com and a concept called Affiliate Marketing (AM). I signed up and started asking questions about AM. I found that you bring up blogs, forum sites, survey sites, product sites, and other kinds of sites, and then collect ad revenue from them. As you get ad revenue, you reinvest some of that back into purchasing more bandwidth for sites that are nearly exceeding their bandwidth, purchase ads on other sites to promote your own sites, and then scale from there with more content, more sites, more ads, and more bandwidth. As a site doesn't do well and you think you can stop it, you end it.

Getting Started - Step 1
The way to get started in this business appears to be with blog sites. You should not just do one, but do several dozen, each on their own exclusive topic. You should customize the blog template a good deal so it doesn't look so generic, add a customer banner graphic, add pictures and video, and add compelling content and blog headlines that lure people in. You should then index these on various social bookmarking sites such as this list. Social bookmarking sites are where you submit your favorite site and explain why you want others to see it, and then others vote it up or down and can add comments on your bookmark.

So what topics do you pick? Well, a good place to start is Google Trends, however, as of late, that site has been "gamed" by other competitor AMers who use it like a battle ground by feeding Google with false trends (searches on bogus topics) that cause it to not be as valuable as it used to be. Google has people who catch this kind of gaming and stop it, but it happens from time to time. You see, in the AM world, you have nice people, and then you have moderately nice people, and then you have cruel ruthless competitors. The nice people are called white hatters, and the bad people are called black hatters. The "game" is to beat everyone else out on search engine optimization (known as SEO) so that one's Google Page Rank (known as PR) is higher and one's social bookmarking rank (known as SBR) is higher among the various social bookmarking sites. The higher your rank, the more likely you will have visitors flooding your site. The more eyeballs, the more potential clicks on those ads, and the more money you could earn. Anyway, the blackhatters want to find all the ways that newbies come into the system, and frustrate them by any means necessary. Then, they want to break all the rules in devious ways that break many website policies. Some techniques the blackhatters use are even illegal.

Me? I'm a whitehatter. Jeremy and many top AMers are whitehatters. However, the top AMers, when they were climbing their way to the top, they did some borderline blackhat things that weren't exactly outside the policy on many websites, but came darn well close to it.

So where do you start your sites with ads? Well, you start them on free sites like blogger.com with no money invested. And back to that Google Trends thing. You need to pick topics for those sites that bring users in, such as a site that collects the absolutely funniest things you saw on YouTube on a particular popular theme (such as rednecks), and then blog about it and name your source.

Next, you sign up at Google AdSense for free and with no obligation. You then use features on the sites (or look up the FAQ at Google AdSense) to include those ads quite easily around your content on your sites.

Sure enough, you'll see a little bit of money go into your account. It might not be much, but what if you could track which sites did better than others and what ads the users clicked on the most? And what if you brought up a hundred sites either on that same topic or very close to it, and then put AdSense on that? Get the picture?