Gadooney.com

(This is a bit of a downer of a post, so I’ll pre-apologize and get that out of the way. But it’s something that needs to be talked about at some point. So, umm, yeah. Sorry.)

As discussed here at various points, affiliate marketing can take many, many forms, which is one of the things that interests me most about it. You can create a site about just about anything and, to greater or lesser extents, make some money. Not only can you write about a virtually endless number of things, but you can tackle it from any number of angles, creating mini-sites, building huge, honking sites, engaging surfers directly, pretending surfers aren’t there, and so on.

In the end, though, your goal as an affiliate is to make money. If you simply wanted to create websites and thought money was of the Devil, you could do that and choose to never include affiliate links. So, by definition, if you’re including affiliate links on your sites, your goal is to make money.

In some cases your desire for money meshes perfectly with your audience. Let’s say you geek out over digital cameras and start a site that reviews digital cameras you’ve had in the past. Someone searches on “digital camera reviews”, lands on your site, and they buy a digital camera using your links. They get great advice on the best camera for them, you get a fat commission, the online retailer sells a digital camera, and everyone is happy. Win-win.

But if you play the affiliate game long enough, you run out of no-brainers like that at a certain point. Or you build a different sort of site on a whim and find that it’s much more profitable than your digital camera site. Regardless of the reason, most affiliates arrive at a point where they find themselves building sites solely to make money, without necessarily adding any value to the experience of surfers who land on their site. The affiliate makes money from the surfer landing on their site, but the surfer doesn’t take much away from the exchange. It’s not really a win-lose situation, more a win-push situation.

The Cisco certification site I’m building is a good example of this. If you look at the content there (and are blunt and prone to speaking your mind), you can’t help but say something along the lines of: “If I’m looking for info on CCNA classes and land on your site after searching for “CCNA classes” in Google, that’s not really helpful. You’re just repeating basic stuff I already know, not telling me where I can take classes at, what they cost, or anything useful like that. Sure, you’ve got Google Adsense ads right there which link to actual programs offering classes, but that’s annoying for me to have click two extra times to get to some place that actually offers CCNA classes.”

And you’d be exactly right. On every point. Guilty as charged. I’m intentionally creating content that is solely designed to rank well in search results for terms that I know are profitable when Adsense ads are clicked. Even worse, if you look at all of the posts on the site so far, I’m basically just regurgitating the same basic, very broad information over and over. I’m optimizing each page for best traction in search results, making it unique enough, and using different combinations of commonly-associated semantic terms, but it’s basically the same damn stuff.

Even worse than all that, I’m intentionally making the Adsense links look like normal navigation links on the site, with the sole intention of hoping that less than savvy surfers won’t even realize those are ads and click on them, thinking they are navigational links to the sorts of things they wanted when they searched for “CCNA classes” in the first damn place and landed on my page. Again, guilty as charged.

Why, then, am I being an ass like that? Why am I cluttering up search results with pages that are designed to add no value to a surfer’s experience and only designed to trick them into clicking links that make me money. Because it works. Because I like money. Because I can.

If that sounds cold and heartless, well, it is cold and heartless. I’ve made the decision that I like money more than I like always being warm and fuzzy in everything I do. Sure, I could justify the above in all sorts of ways (I’m refining their search by getting them to a central page where multiple CCNA programs/boot camps are accessible via a single click; some less savvy users appreciate general, broad overviews; compared to outright spam and sites that scrape keywords and would otherwise appear in search results, my pages are actually useful and helpful) but in the end that’s a silly exercise and we all know it.

It’s important to note, though, that the last thing I’m suggesting is that it’s an all-or-nothing decision. I build lots of kinds of sites and will continue to do so. Some will be mercenary and heartless, designed to just make money and concerned with little else. Other sites I build, like this one, will be much more useful and more akin to the win-win situation outlined above in the digital camera scenario. I seem to work more efficiently when I’m mixing in a variety of types of sites, so that’s usually how I work.

Where you draw your own line in the sand is obviously up to you. My goal in bringing all of this up is to not only be open and honest about the realities of some of the things that go on in the affiliate world, as well as pointing out that the canvas you have to work with is very broad. You might stick solely to projects that you believe are useful and better the Web as a whole, and you can still make tons of money. Conversely, you might decide to be very mercenary and to only build sites that make you the most money, with no regard to anything else. As long as you sleep well at night, the sky’s the limit.

I’m finally getting around to reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money–That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!, which is pretty interesting despite it being ten years old or so. I’ve got a pretty good working knowledge of assorted financial/accounting/investing issues, but it’s more based on mucking my way through things and learning as I go, so I’m planning a reading binge in the near future to get up to speed on a pretty wide range of topics related to the above, especially in regards to investing in real estate and the various vehicles to do so.

One interesting point he hammers home in the above book is a very stripped down approach to looking at your assets and liabilities. In his eyes (and this is a bit debtateable but still interesting) your primary residence is a liability, not an asset. It takes money out of your pocket on a daily basis, as far as the mortgage, maintenance, property taxes, etc. Sure, many people profit from their home when they sell it, but that’s not guaranteed and the profit appears when you no longer possess the liability of a home, as you’ve sold it. It takes large amounts of money and time from your pocket, so it’s a liability.
Let’s say you start a business of your own, a bakery, that you work long hours at every day. It’s profitable, you pay your bills, but you’re there ten hours a day. It’s a liability, not an asset. Your time has value and it’s robbing you of an enormous amount of time.

To be considered an asset, something must not only put money in your pocket but it should do so even when you’re absent. Assets can’t require all of your attention, as they typically turn into liabilities at that point.

That doesn’t mean that working at the bakery is bad, just because the business is currently a liability. Or that it will always be a liability. If you hire a great manager and pay them all of the bakery profits minus $100, then go and start a new business, say a car wash, where you work at ten hours a day, suddenly your bakery becomes an asset (it’s generating $100/month in profits for you, with no work at all required of you) and the car wash is a liability. And so on. Assets don’t appear out of thin air, and usually the way to get them is to work hard at your day job, save money, and invest that money in assets. Grow your assets to a certain point and suddenly your job becomes managing and expanding your assets, not working at a day job.

(I’m simplifying his viewpoint a bit there for the sake of brevity, but that’s the basic gist of what he’s getting at.)

All of which made me immediately ponder the affiliate stuff, as far as whether my affiliate sites are assets or liabilities. Remember, something can make money for you and still be a liability, if it consumes too much of your time. So you could have a site that made you $3,000/month in income but it could be a liability if it required constant updating and attention and you worked on it 60 hours a week, while a site that made just $20/month could be an asset, if you never touched it and it simply ran on auto-pilot.

It’s interesting, too, as nearly all affilliate sites start out as a liability (you put in much work but make no money for the first few months, due to the nature of search engine traffic), but “successful” ones are those that tip over at some point and become assets, when the income they produce is greater than the value of the time you put into them, resulting in a surplus.

If I look back at all the affiliate sites I’ve done and isolate the ones that became assets, they pretty much fall into two major categories:

1) Sites that were narrowly focused and had a well-defined beginning and ending point: The key here, methinks, is that there’s an ending point for these sites, when you hit the finish line and say “Done, been nice knowing you, go make me some damn money.” Part of that, though, is being realistic and savvy from the very beginning, and tackling projects that are focused and defined and don’t require Herculean efforts to build and (most importantly) don’t require updating or attention moving forward.

The legal weed site I built back in ancient times is a good example of that. I cringe even including the link to it, as that’s an ugly, ugly site, things are completely broken, lots of links don’t work, and it’s in general something I’d never publicly claim ownership of. But that thing consistently makes me $100-$200 every damn month, without fail, and over it’s lifetime it’s probably make me close to $5,000. Considering I built it in a weekend and have never, ever touched it again, it’s been one of my best assets.

2) Sites that were on topics that I enjoyed writing about: My poker blog is the best example of this, and something I’ve discussed a lot here already. Even though it was very open-ended and consumed a lot of my time, it turned into a major asset. I can’t even begin to count the hours I put into the site and the related projects it spawned, but the income generated greatly exceed that time expenditure. My goal is for this site to follow a similar path, as far as a sprawling, time-intensive project but one that I enjoy, which I can hopefully find ways to monetize over time.

The key thing to take away here is that it’s okay to throw yourself into a huge, sprawling affiliate site that will never end, if it’s something you enjoy and love. There are multiple paths to turning sites into assets so don’t get locked into thinking you have to be mercenary about it, grinding out 25-50 page sites on topics you could care less about, and repeating it mindlessly, over and over.

It’s also interesting to look at a site in progress, such as the Cisco Certification site I recently started. What do I need to do to make that an asset and not a liability? Well, for me the path is pretty clear: hit it and quit it. If I can build a 50 page or so site targeting the most lucrative keywords related to Cisco certification stuff, and I can do it in a relatively short amount of time, it’ll be an asset. It’ll never make tons of money but when I’m done, I’m done. Whether or not it’ll be an asset, then, hinges on if I can build it quickly enough so that it consumes less of my valuable time. If it took me three months to build, working every day, it’d probably be doomed to be a liability. If I can build it in a week or two, it’ll be an asset.

Much of that reasoning, though, is based on the fact that I get no thrills out of writing about Cisco stuff and, honestly, don’t know much about it and have never taken a single class in that field. So for me it’s a chore to grind out content for that site. I knew that going on, so I designed the project to be very close-ended, with a very obvious finish line.

Let’s say instead that I had a bajillion Cisco certifications and loved that stuff, and felt strongly that there should be a site that was a comprehensive, useful recource for anyone looking to get a Cisco certification. If that were the case, I might instead decide to create a site that was a daily blog about my work with Cisco products, with a forum for users to discuss different networking issues, personal development, etc., as well as reviews of programs and schools offering certification classes so that users could find the best programs, and on and on and on. It would literally be a site with no end, as there would always be new features and content you could add.

And, more importantly, it would have just as good a shot at being an affiliate asset for you as my stripped down, mercenary approach to the exact same topic. For me, building a site like that would turn into a liability. It’d be a chore, I wouldn’t be excited, and that would show in the half-assed product I turned out. For you, though, it’d be a labor of love and that would show in your work, as you constantly improved it and generated more traffic and turned it into a major asset.

In keeping with the routine of checking up on assorted stats every Saturday morning while waking up and swilling sweet, sweet coffee, here goes:

Traffic:

Traffic was down a bit from the first week, but with the holidays in effects (which typically kill website traffic in general as people are having off having fun away from the computer and not bored at work) that should be taken with a grain o’ salt. Most people are here because of the poker blog, too, as nothing has been indexed in search engines yet, so I’m not paying a ton of attention to unique users, hits, etc. The first few months of any new site isn’t really indicative of much, traffic-wise, so don’t get too hung up on looking for trends and anything useful.

One nice thing I’m seeing, and a trend that you should look for early on, is whether the search engine spiders are finding and indexing your content. Each search engine sends out automated spiders or bots that constantly crawl through your site, taking a snapshot of each page for the search engine’s index of what’s out there on the Web. The schedule varies from site to site and search engine to search engine, but hopefully within the first few weeks of your site being live you’ll be visited by the search engine spiders for the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN).

These visits from search engine spiders show up in your stats, so when you see that Googlebot has been hitting your site, that’s good news, as it means Google is aware of your site and indexing. What’s important to remember, though, is that it doesn’t mean that your pages are being included in search results yet, so don’t go nuts searching in Google and trying to find them. Remember, Google typically imposes a sandbox filter on new sites, which means that they have to wait a month or two before they get included in results. They’re being visited and indexed, but they’re not included in the search results until the site has been around for awhile.

So it’s good to see visits from spiders in your stats, and I’m already seeing regular visits from the spiders for Google, Yahoo (whose spider is called Inktomi Slurp in some stats packages), and MSN.

I also got a lot of traffic from Reddit last week, as some kind soul bookmarked my Writing Good Content post in their system. One thing I like about the WordPress theme I’m using for this site is that if you’re on an individual post page (not the home page, but clicking through to the individual page that posts are on), it has built in support for people to recommend pages at social bookmarking sites like delicious, Digg, Technorati, Reddit, and more. Those links come baked into the theme and I didn’t have to lift a finger to make that happen. Depending on the type of site you’re working on, you can get some nice traffic from social bookmarking sites such as those above.

Another nice benefit of using WordPress is that it’s integrated with Technorati and automatically makes your content immediately searchable there, so I got a handful of hits from people at Technorati searching on various affiliate topics.

Income:

For the week I made $3.89 at Adsense, and $12.50 at CommissionJunction, for a total of $16.39. Again, not paying much attention to these numbers for the first few months, as they’re not indicative of much.

Content:

While it’s nice to review your traffic stats and income on a weekly basis, it’s also a good idea to check in with your output on the content side, too, as well as running a quick dipstick test to make sure your project as a whole is on track with where you want it to be.

I’m pretty happy with the form things are taking here at Gadooney and it’s been easy (and fun) to get content up on a daily basis. It’s a pace I can maintain pretty much indefinitely, and, to be honest, the stuff I’m posting is also helping me as an affiliate myself. I always cringe at putting myself out there on public display, in any capacity, but good things happen when I force that upon myself. I’m maintaining better habits myself in my own affiliate work and staying more abreast of assorted issues and topics than in the past, for fear of looking foolish about something I might preach about here.

I’m also encouraged by the fact that this site is reasonably unique and reasonably valuable to people looking to make some extra money via affiliate marketing. Sure, there are the uber affiliates discussing the business at sites like ProBlogger and JohnChow.com, but that’s an entirely different world than most people starting out in the affiliate business have access to. Don’t get me wrong, both of those are great, useful sites, but the issues you struggle with when learning the ropes are different than the issues faced when trying to optimally monetize your hugely-popular, heavily-trafficked sites that have been around since ancient times.

I still need to work at being more accessible here, putting a face to things, and finding ways to drag readers into the fray, especially those who end up being successful in launching their own sites. The ultimate success (and profitability) of the site not only hinges on whether I can successfully help virtual strangers make money from the Web, but also in my ability to make those successes patently obvious to any new visitor to the site. I’d assumed originally that it’d be enough to simply show that I can successfully crank out profitable sites, but that’s not optimal. If Manny Ramirez filmed an infomercial offering to teach anyone to hit a curveball for $1,000, you’d see housewives and ninety-seven year old geezers mashing curveballs, not footage of Manny himself hitting curveball after curveball.

As far as being more accessible, I just need to get over my fear that anything personal and off-topic is to be avoided. Sure, a few readers will likely be annoyed, as they’re solely after content that might make them money, but most people enjoy seeing the person behind the blog, as long as it’s interesting (not a list of things I’ve eaten for lunch in the last week, sub-divided by food group, then listed in alphabetical order) and done in moderation. I’m shooting for an open, conversational sort of tone, so there’s no reason to shy away from the personal at times. If anything, it’s likely more profitable, as it’s much easier to take someone’s advice if you feel like you know them, even if it’s just a friendship conducted over the Internet tubes.

If you can’t tell by now, I’m a big fan of using WordPress for affiliate sites. The price is right (it’s free), it’s a snap to install and use, and it lets you get up and running with affiliate marketing even if you barely know any HTML at all.

WordPress also has a lot of nifty plugins that people have created to make your life easier as an affiliate, too. Below are some of the free plugins that I currently use, all designed to shave off half a minute here, or a couple of minutes there, in the daily routine of working on content for assorted affiliate sites.

Adsense Deluxe: This is a very useful plugin that lets you manage Google Adsense ads throughout your site from the WordPress interface. You create the ads at Adsense but the plugin lets you quickly add them to certain pages but not others, run multiple ads simultaneously, and quickly swap out ad formats on the fly. The real value in this one is that you no longer have to manually go into templates or individual pages to swap out ads, as the plugin centralizes all of that work and lets you manage all of your Adsense ads from one location.

aLinks: This plugin allows you to quickly embed your affiliate links in your content, with a minimum of hassle. You basically tell it that you’d like the phrase “blue widgets” to always link to Widgets.com, with your affiliate link included in the link, so that when you type “blue widget” in WordPress, it automatically converts it to a hyperlink with your affiliate code attached. This seems like a small thing but it will literally save you many hours, as you routinely link to the same sorts of things, and this plugin allows you to do it on the fly.

SlimStats: This is a simple stats package that lets you quickly get website traffic stats on your WordPress dashboard. There are fancy stats plugins out there but this one is a snap to install and is designed to put very little load on your site, while giving you all of the basic stats and functionality that you need.

WP-Amazon: This one essentially pulls the Amazon catalog into the WordPress environment and makes it much easier to add links to specific titles and products in Amazon’s affiliate program.

Amazon Media Manager: Another plugin that speeds the process of adding Amazon products into your site.

Was it really just last week that I started this thing up for reals? I suppose the lifespan for Web ventures is a bit like dog years, with one week live on the Interwebs equivalent to a month or two in meat space, but it seems like I’ve been kicking around here for much longer than a week.

Free for all Friday. Got a question? Ask it.

Today is shaping up to be pretty hectic, so it’s a coin-flip as to whether I’ll have time to babble on later about anything even remotely useful. I’m meeting with a realtor later this morning to check out some possible investment properties and I still need to wage war on the last of the boxes and unpacking from when we moved in August. I swore I’d knock that out during my glut of time off from the day job in December, and, err, the clock is ticking much more loudly and it’s still not done.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is basically the practice of optimizing your content for the best results in search engine queries by surfers. All search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, et al.) use a unique algorithm that they’ve developed that takes all of the pages they’ve indexed and tries to apply certain rules to it. So if two sites have a page about “wombat reproduction”, and someone in Thailand types “wombat reproduction” into Google and runs a search, one of those pages is listed in the #1 spot in the results, with the other being listed #2. It’s the ranking algorithms built into each search engine that make that decision.

Working backwards from that point, it stands to reason that if you optimize your content to take into account how search engines rank pages, then your page will more likely land in the #1 spot in search results, which means that it will be clicked more often than the #2 result, which means you’ll make more money as an affiliate. SEO, then, is that process, where you create and optimize your content in certain ways with the hopes of getting ranked higher in search results.

In some ways, SEO for affiliate sites is a very natural process and dovetails perfectly with good writing practices in general. Search engines weigh the title of a page very heavily when ranking results, so picking a clear, focused title for each page of content not only helps you in the world of SEO, it’s something that good writers of Web content naturally do, like breathing. That’s a win-win for you, as you don’t even have to think about it.

The same is true for keeping paragraphs relatively short and sprinkling your keywords throughout the body of the text. Again, it’s only natural that a good writer would do those things, as surfers don’t want to tuck into a solid block of text containing 172,182 words, and the repetition of the subject of the page is a very natual thing to do, for emphasis and clarity.

Which brings us to an important point. Many people like to insinuate that SEO is some black, voodoo magic, deriving from much complicated analysis and number crunching, and beyond the ken of mere mortals. To which I reply, heartily and succintly: “Bullshit.”

Stepping back a bit, as search engines evolve over the years and get smarter and better at what they do (finding and organizing content and hypothetically returning the most useful of what it finds to anyone querying it, in order of usefulness), they’ve done so in fairly common ways. Back in ancient times, search engines heavily weighed meta tags, which are basically invisible titles that people creating Web pages could embed in their pages, to describe in general what the page was about. That’s a decent idea, in theory, because the person creating the page knows best what it’s about, so why not value what they say the page is about.

In practice, though, it didn’t take long for sneaky monkeys to realize that, and start cramming in every word they could think of into the meta tags of every page they built, because it would generate more traffic, and more traffic is always better than less traffic. So search engines were suddenly being manipulated into returning very junky results, until it got too obvious and painful for them and they stopped adding extra value to anything in the meta tags.

This cat and mouse game has always gone on, where creators of Web pages try to manipulate search results in their favor, and always will go on. Search engines constantly tweak their ranking algorithms to combat that, as they have a vested interest in returning on-topic, useful search results. If they do, people use their search engine. If they don’t provide good results, people use the search engine that does provide useful results.

As search engines evolve, they’re more sophisticated, and more and more their efforts are focused on using semantic considerations into their rankings. That is worthy of a whole post of its own, but in a nutshell all that means is that search engines are increasingly aware of what good, focused on-topic writing is, and they can pick it out from all the trash out there. More and more, the SEO you should be doing when writing content is simply practicing good writing skills, such as strong titles, employing commonly-used synonyms ad associated words in your content, linking to other content on your site in natural ways, and so on.

In the past, SEO for affiliate sites typically included much more artifical methods to game the system, such as repeating keywords in both bold and italics, having keywords on each page with H1, H2, and H3 tags in descending order, maintaining a certain keyword density, having all internal and incoming links exactly corresponding to the targeted keyword phrase, etc.

Happily, though, that’s less and less the case, and good news for you. Instead of disappearing down a rabbit hole of endlessly fiddling and manipulating your layout and content, trying to play the SEO game, you can safely ignore a lot of that hoo-ha and mumbo-jumbo, and focus more on writing good, solid content. I’ll post more practical advice on this in the future but I just wanted to get the general gist of this out there, for anyone quietly obsessing over the fact that they’d heard SEO was the best thing since sliced bread but were worried that they knew nothing about it.

One new thing this project has taught me is that it’s actually helpful in some ways to know that I have an audience as I create this site, as it has been generating a lot of motivation and enthusiasm in general. In the past I’d tend to claim that not having an audience was actually beneficial, since it freed you up from obsessing about every little detail of your site, waiting until the site was “perfect” before launching it, and in general dragging your feet and delaying getting lots of good content up.

But having an audience (or simply working under the assumption that someone might read what you’ve created, at any given time) does have some advantages, espcially for people just getting started with affiliate work. Even if you aren’t making enough to buy a postage stamp, those first few clicks on Google Adsense that you get are pretty exciting. There’s also a very basic human tendency to work harder and “succeed” when we know someone is looking and monitoring our progress, as the desire to impress and look sexy is pretty hard-baked into our monkey genes.

With all that in mind, I thought I’d extend an open offer to anyone who has landed here and is playing along at home, working on their own affiliate sites. If you’d like an audience for your site, leave a comment or holler at me and I’ll regularly check out your site and periodically mention it here in posts. Won’t cost you a penny and you’ll get some free incoming links, as well as potentially supportive readers kicking around on your site and clicking Adsense links. One nice thing about affiliate marketing is that there are many thousands of potentially profitable niches out there, so it’s pretty easy to be supportive and help one another out, without encouraging the competition and impacting your own bottom line.

Most successful affiliates are willing to tinker and try new things, and usually have a few irons in the fire at any given time. While I highly recommend focusing pretty narrowly on your first site and not getting distracted, I also think it’s important to show you exactly what’s going on here, behind the curtain, as I work on assorted projects and sites.

I’d mentally earmarked much of December to getting this site up and rolling, so I didn’t have much planned other than that, even though I knew I’d have a lot of free time what with taking vacation time at work, the holidays, visiting the in-laws and having lots of otherwise dead time to fill, etc. My original plan, though, was to pre-populate the site with lots of content. When I decided instead to do much of that on the fly and let the site unfold over time, I ended up with some extra time on my hands, as I was pretty happy with how things were going at Gadooney.com and already had some future posts drafted, and was in danger of bombarding you with even more posts per day to chew on and absorb.

So I thought, “Hmm, maybe I should launch a new site from scratch, one focused solely on Adsense, so I can better illustrate that process and provide a clearer picture into how much time it normally takes a site like that to make any money, since it’ll take awhile to get indexed in any search engines.”

But what sort of site should it be? While writing about what you enjoy definitely makes site-building much, much easier, sometimes it’s nice to just bang out a smaller site with a well-defined goal, starting, and ending point. You find a potentially profitable niche, build it, create pages for each juicy keyword phrase, then move on. Months later, when you’ve largely forgotten about it, it’ll get fully-indexed in search engines and suddenly (hopefully) it’s generating $20-$30/month for you from Adsense clicks.

Which brings us to an interesting and important point. It’s easy to read the above sentence and think: “Umm, okay, high roller. All that work for $20-30? How the hell do you ever make any real money if that’s all you can expect to make? Give me a freaking break, I’d be better off begging for change on the corner.”

If it took me three months to build that site, then you’d have a very valid point. The potential income from it is way too low to make it profitable. But what if I could build that site and completely finish it in a week? What if I could do it in two or three days?

Suddenly there’s some real money to be made, sitting there on the table. Let’s pretend that you build five affiliate sites a month, and each individual site makes just $20/month from Adsense clicks, which means that each site only makes roughly .67/day. That’s just a click or two a day, for each site, if you’re targeting reasonably profitable terms.

For a full year, you build five sites a month, with each site generating a click or two a day, making $20/month. They won’t immediately get traffic and clicks, so we’ll factor in a delayed lag time of one month for each batch of sites, before they start eanring you any money.

How much do you think you’d make in a year, doing the above? A couple of hundred bucks? Maybe a little bit more? $500? $1,000?
You’d make $6,600 for the year.  Keep in mind, too, that at that point you’d have 60 sites built, which would continue to earn $1,200/month, moving forward, even if you never built another page of content. All from building just five sites a month, each of which got just a few Adsense clicks per day.

To be fair, the above is much easier said than done, as your pages would move around in search results over time, sites would decay and fall out of the results and earn you $0 instead of $20/month, it doesn’t factor in any of your costs, yada yada yada. But the principle at the heart of it is a very important and valid one:

Gadooney Rule #2: Affiliates can make thousands of dollars a month from sites that only generate a few Adsense clicks per day. 

But I’ve managed to get sidetracked myself, as this started with a discussion of having some excess free time and deciding to launch a new affiliate site. With all of the above rolling through my head, I decided to launch a new site targeting the CCNA/CCNP keywords that I’ve already discussed here.

Cisco Certifications

Seeing no need to reinvent the wheel, I registered the domain name, adding it to my web hosting package, and installed the same WordPress theme I’m using here, with a few minor tweaks to the color scheme. I also moved over some of the example content I’d used here and created a quick page on general Cisco certification stuff. All of that took me approximately 5 minutes.

The ultimate plan is to create 50 or so pages of focused content, for the related keyword terms with the highest estimated CPC. I’ll likely tweak the WordPress theme and optimize the Adsense ads at some point, but there’s no reason to fiddle and obsess with that. My goal is to bang out all of the content by Sunday, with the site largely being done except for the tweaking and fiddling. Then I’ll move on to something completely different, largely ignoring the site until it actually starts to generate some search engine traffic.

Much ado is made about links to and from websites. And rightfully so, as they play a role in how highly your site and pages are ranked in search engines and can serve as a traffic source. But there’s also a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding regarding links, and many people waste far too much time obsessing over links when they first start out.

Links to your site (otherwise known as incoming links) are a good thing. A very good thing. But all links aren’t created equal, and many people waste a lot of time at the beginning of their affiliate careers worrying far too much about getting incoming links.

The biggest waste of time are reciprocal links, and people who expend much energy trying to get them. People find similar sites, dig up a contact email for the webmaster, and send an email saying “If you add a link to my site on your links page, I’ll add a link to your site on mine, and whee, we’ll both win!”

Except, well, no, no you won’t. Search engines are moving away from attaching much value at all to links like this, as they’re smart enough these days to see the artificial nature of the reciprocal link. In the past that wasn’t the case, so search engines saw any incoming link to your site (including reciprocal links) essentially as a vote of popularity, counting all links in your favor as a sign that you have a popular, useful site that should be ranked highly in search results.

But that’s changed, and the search engine algorithms now severely devalue reciprocal links. They’re artificial and not a sign of overall worthiness of the site. Lots of reciprocal links usually only signify that the owner is trying to manipulate search results.

Note, though, that I’m only talking about reciprocal links here, where two sites agree to add links to one another in a fairly artifical fashion. Incoming links to your site in general are very, very important, and will be the topic of much future discussion here.

There are also outgoing links, which are links from your site to other content out there on the Web. If used in moderation, these are fairly neutral, as far as value to you and your site. Keep in mind that any external link is a potential traffic suck, as the surfer may click on that link and never return to your site. But don’t be scared to include external links, especially if the links are useful to surfers.

The last type of link are internal links, which are links you create yourself that link to other content on your site. It’s a good idea to get in the habit of providing lots of internal links, as it not only helps search engines find all the pages on your site and index them, but it’s a good practice in general, as it helps surfers navigate your site as well.

Earning your very first affiliate dollar is usually one of the hardest dollars you’ll ever earn (assuming you weren’t around in the Great Depression making a penny an hour busting up rocks with a sledgehammer). Not only are you learning the affiliate ropes in general, but the nature of affiliate marketing means that your efforts start slowly and build, as your site gets traction and is indexed in search engines.

Likewise, earning your first $100 from affiliate marketing is the hardest hundred bucks you’ll ever make. Don’t even try to calculate your hourly wage, as it’ll likely be close to zero. You’ll have worked very hard and invested much time and finally, after months, have just a lousy $100 to show for it. This is where many affiliates abandon ship and simply say the hell with it, they could make more money working at Burger King.

Which is just about the worst decision possible, because they were just getting to the good part.

Earning your first $1,000 from affiliate marketing is probably the easiest $1,000 you’ll ever make.

Umm, excuse me, what?

The majority of successful affiliates stick to a simple formula. After much trial and effort they find something that works (i.e. it makes them $100), then they hammer on it, launching new sites, expanding existing sites, whatever. Creating new sites and content gets easier with time, so their efficiency and hourly wage rises.

Once you scratch and claw your way to your first $100, you’ve usually established all the skills and chops necessary to make money through affiliate marketing. At that point, you’re sledding downhill, with much velocity, and the hardest dollar principle falls apart. Making money suddenly gets easier, much easier, as you not only work more efficiently, with a purpose, but you have direct, motivational proof that this stuff really does work.