Gadooney.com

This was a pretty hectic week on the affiliate front, although there’s not a lot to show for it in the “Done” category. I ended up sinking a lot of time into a potential freelance project, which basically involves building out a pretty large site from scratch as a resume, which hopefully will be good enough to land me the gig. I’m also in the process of reviving a couple of older projects that had lain dormant for awhile, Oddsnark and Science Fiction Robots, as well as getting close to launching an entirely new sort of endeavor that’s got  me pretty excited.

But what about your Cisco Certifications site, you ask, the one you were going to bang out by last Sunday and be done with?  Err, yeah, not so much. But in the whole vein of not fearing getting sidetracked (as long as you’re working on something), I’m not going to sweat it too much. Remember, new sites don’t get full traction in search engines for months, so the only real deadline for new sites you launch are the fairly arbitrary ones you set for yourself, at least until it gets fully indexed.

I still plan on knocking out the Cisco site in the next week or two, but I’m not going to freak out if I end up working on other stuff. As long as I’m doing work and making progress and not sitting in my boxers, watching Beauty and the Geek marathons, picking my nose, it’s all good.

I’m probably going to skip the full on review of traffic and stats income this week, as I’m a little short on time this morning, but it wasn’t very exciting. I think I made $12 on the Adsense side, and $0 at CommissionJunction. Traffic was up a bit from the previous week but largely due to people coming back to work after vacation.

Gots questions? Ask ‘em.

Falstaff has been playing along at home and asked that I take a quick look at the sites he’s working on. Can do. If you’d like reviews of your own sites, holler at me and it shall be so.

Here are the sites we’re looking at today: Full Shill Poker, Boogie Turtle, Lighting for Worship, and Charlotte Theatre News and Gossip.

As a whole, that’s a damn good start, especially since you were starting from scratch just a few weeks ago, with no real knowledge of WordPress, hosting stuff, etc. It’s easy to be overwhelmed at first by all the things you don’t know, but you’re plowing ahead and getting content up. I also like that you have many different types of sites you’re working on, so it’s easy to mix in different types of content, work over here a bit, then over there, and not get burned out writing about the same stuff on the same site.

Full Shill Poker and Boogie Turtle are the most developed, as far as content and theme. It’s pretty easy to tell that both are subjects you’re interested in and knowledgable about, and the content you’re posting on each is right on track, as far as the stuff that’ll get you search engine traffic. Each fits into a niche that you know about and can easily create content for. Each also has existing affiliate programs that meshes well with your content (poker and casino affiliate programs and online retailers that sell CDs), so you don’t have to rely solely on Adsense as far as monetizing the sites.

While I usually don’t worry about the layout of the site all that much in the beginning, I do have to say that I’m not a fan of the dark backgrounds, especially on Full Shill Poker, as the combination of the black background and white text in that font makes my eyes scream for mercy after reading it for a bit. This falls into the personal taste category somewhat, but in general it’s recommended that you stay away from black/dark grey background sites, as a gawdawful number of expensive studies have shown that sites with plain white backgrounds, black text, and blue links/colors perform the best.

My approach to this in my own sites is to generally look at the Yahoos, Googles, and Amazons of the world and do what they do, as it’s obviously working. Boring, yes, but it’s hard to argue with their success.

A by-product of the dark backgrounds you’re using is that the ads (which generally have a white background) are very obviously ads, jumping out from the screen and blaring at the surfer. This is a little counter-intuitive, but that’s actually bad. Your goal is to be sneaky and to blend and incorporate the ads as much as possible into your site design. If it screams out “I’M AN ADVERTISEMENT!”, surfers have become conditioned to almost subconsciously ignore it; if it appears to be part of the navigation of the site, more people tend to read it and/or click on it.

Don’t be afraid to specialize your ads, especially on Full Shill Poker. I like the riff on “Full Tilt Poker” and wonder if you could simply shill for them, as far as the ads and baners you display. Having done the poker/casino affiliate thing, in general there’s not a huge difference from what you’ll make from program to program, barring special circumstances. If all of your advertising is focused on Full Tilt (and tghtly integrated into the site design) it gives it a more weighty, polished look, instead of banners for a bunch of different sites jumping out at you.

As far as Boogie Turtle, I’d work in some direct product links in each review, especially if they’re sold on Amazon, iTunes, or at some other online retailer. You might have to do some poking around to see what music CD programs are out there, which pay the best, etc. The reviews are great but you’ll make more money if you have linked album covers or tracks. You could also list the tracks on each album and have them hyperlinked, so that surfers click on them looking for a sample but end up getting transported to the page at the retailer, where sample tracks actually are and where they can buy it, and you can make some cash.

For affiliate sites that are tied into products, it’s always best to include as many direct product links to specific products as you can. Links and banners to Amazon are fine but your real money is in providing direct links to buy the specific product you’re talking about, as that’s what people are after.

Lighting for Worship and Charlotte Theatre News and Gossip are still in the infant stages, so not much to say there.  Forum sites like the theatre one are hard to monetize sometimes but they’re usually very little work for you, as forum members supply most of the content. They’re also a no-brainer if it’s something you’re already involved in, especially if it provides a useful service that is otherwise lacking. I like the idea behind Lighting for Worship, as I can’t imagine there are too many sites with content about that particular niche, and you can potentially not only get Jebus-related traffic (of which there’s a bunch) but also traffic from people looking for more info on the equipment itself.

All in all, you’re off to a great start, especially considering that you’re starting from square one. Keep cranking out content. The main things I’d consider tweaking are the dark backgrounds on the first two sites and to fiddle with the ads more, trying to incorporate them as seamlessly as possible into the site.

In many ways, there’s no such thing as “bad” traffic to your website. With bandwidth costing next to nothing these days, there’s really no downside to getting lots of surfers on your site who are immediately disinterested in your content and back out or close the browser in 0.02 seconds. It’s not “good” traffic, as you can’t profit from it, but it’s more neutral than “bad”.

The only time traffic goes bad is if you can’t profit from it and you’re spending time and/or money to acquire it. If you’re spending $1 in labor or advertising to attract traffic that makes you $.10, that’s bad traffic, assuming you’re doing everything correctly on your end to optimize your site to generate money.

Remember, your time is valuable and you need to account for it when you’re trying to generate traffic to your site. Just because you’re not spending any money on traditional advertising doesn’t mean that your acquisition costs for traffic are $0.

Let’s look at some of the more common sources of traffic:

• Search engines: This will likely always be both the most common source of traffic to your affiliate site as well as the most cost-effective. Getting search engine traffic is as easy (and hard) as simply writing good content that people are interested in and search for.
• Links from other websites: Pretty straightforward, as we’ve all clicked through a link from one site to another. These links arise in different ways, naturally and artifically, but they involve the same basic mechanism of links between websites. These also include links from leaving comments yourself on blogs and other sites that both allow for comments and display your URL on the comment.
• Social bookmarking sites: These are your Diggs and del.icio.us and other sites where surfers keep lists of bookmarked sites that are shared publicly. Most of the social bookmarking sites keep lists of most popular bookmarks, recently bookmarked sites, etc., and you’ll typically get a burst of traffic (or an avalanche of traffic if you land on Digg’s main page) when surfers bookmark your pages and they show up on the recently added pages.
• Forums:  There are tons of forums out there on tons of topics. You’ll get traffic from these when users post links to your sites and other forum users click through. If you’re a member of forums that allow linked signature lines, you can create a signature line with links to your sites and generate traffic from your own forum posts, as well.
• Word-of-mouth/email: We’ve probably all been told by someone to check out a cool site and typed it in directly into the browser, or have been sent an email with a link to a page on a site somewhere out there on the Internet tubes.
• Paid advertising: This takes various forms but typically is generated by programs like Google Adwords, where you bid on certain keywords related to your site and pay a fee per clickthrough to your site. This would also include buying ads on other sites or even traditional methods such as buying offline advertising.
• Traffic exchange, hubs, and click exchange rings: These are basically links from other sites, but completely artificial, so I’m listing them separately. These just circulate traffic endlessly, for no purpose other than to boost traffic to sites.

So the question becomes which of those are good, which are bad, and what should you be doing to try to get more of the good traffic while avoiding the bad traffic?

Like anything, it all depends on your site and the nature of the traffic, but in general the best traffic for affiliate sites is search engine traffic. You can control it to some extent by writing good, focused content, so the traffic you get is usually pre-sold and inclined to click on links that make you money. They’re after what you’re advertising, which is why they landed on your site, so it’s a much easier sell.

All search engine traffic isn’t good, though, as you’ll inevitable get ranked for weird terms that really have nothing to do with what your site is about. This happens and really isn’t something you can do much about, other than to write focused content. It’s neutral traffic, for the most part, unless you’re wasting too much time on creating the unfocused content that’s attracting it.

If it’s just surfers landing on your site from stray words in your focused content, that’s fine, but it starts to become bad traffic if you’re investing too much time slapping up any old content for the sake of getting hits.

Traffic from other websites that link to you is generally good traffic, but it’s hard to get. You can’t make someone link to you, so you can’t scale this one up as quickly as you can with search engine traffic. It’s usually good traffic because sites that link to another tend to share similar themes, so a surfer that was interested in the original site is likely inclined to be interested when they click through a link and land on your site.

While you can’t control who links to you, you can encourage it by linking to them yourself and clicking through that link on a regular basis. Webmasters are obsessed with stats and watch like a hawk to see if anyone is linking to them. If they see consistent traffic coming from your site, they’ll usually link back to you, out of professional courtesy. Linking to similarly themed sites can also help you in search engine rankings as long as you do it in moderation and don’t have a ginormous number of links going out from your site.

Comment link traffic can also be good, if you do it in moderation. If you spam comments just trying to get a boost from all the links back, you’ll get crap traffic and possibly punished in some search engines. If you judiciously leave comments on blogs of a simmilar nature to your site, though, this can be a good source of traffic. 

Traffic from social bookmarking sites looks nice but it’s often hard to monetize. Digg can bring your site to its knees if you’re on a shared server and the general consensus is that it’s hard to make money from the traffic, as people on those sites are generally fairly savvy and not as inclined as a grandmother from Wisconsin to click on an Adsense link.

Like anything, though, this can be good traffic, especially if you’re smart enough to optimize your pages specifically for the social bookmarking sites sending you traffic. It becomes bad traffic if you spend too much time trying to game the system, obsessing on getting certain pages bookmarked and not spending enough time simply cranking out good, focused content.

Forum traffic is generally decent traffic, as it’s often on a similar theme and of interest to the surfer clicking through. It’s usually slightly better if it comes organically from some unaffiliated party on a forum saying “Hey, check out this cool site” and linking to you, as opposed to generated yourself from putting links in your signature line and posting a lot on forums.

If you’re spending a lot of time posting solely for the purpose of getting forum traffic, you’re probably wasting time and would be better off writing more good content for your site.

Word of mouth traffic is good but extremely hard to get. All you can do to get it is to have a kick-ass site or one that entertains people in some sort of unique fashion. Think of the things that prompt you to recommend sites to other people, as far as examples of what you have to do to get this kind of traffic.

Paid advertising is a mixed bag. If you’re experienced and know what you’re doing, it can trump all the other traffic sources in value, as you’re attracting surfers that already have their credit card half way out of their wallet. But it can get pricey quickly and optimizing your site for paid traffic is difficult and not for the faint of heart.

Because of the expense, paid traffic can also be the absolute worst for you, as unlike all the others listed above, it’s not free. You’re paying good money for it so it’s disastrously bad traffic if you pay that money and see no return.

Traffic from traffic exchanges, click exchanges, and hubs is just useless. Don’t waste your time with it.

You’ve decided what your first site will be about, registered a domain name, and signed up for a Web hosting package. You’ve got a good handle on the basics of writing good content, you’re not freaking out about SEO, and you want to make some money.

You’ve created a few pages of content and have your basic site up and running, but quickly find yourself pressed against this invisible barrier of sorts. You understand the theory of how all this works, as far as making money, but you haven’t quite bought in to the idea, not completely. You look around the Internet at all of the existing sites and all of the people making tons of money today and you can’t help but feel you’re impossibly behind the curve, that the train left the station long ago without you on it.

There’s also that tiny voice in the back of your head that keeps suggesting that you have no business doing this, that you’re not a good enough writer, that you’re not interesting enough, that you just don’t have the time to make it work, yada yada yada…

Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit…

In many ways, the train hasn’t even yet reached the station, as far as the potential of affiliate marketing. Ever heard of a little country called China? What about India? What do you think might happen over the next decade or two when literally billions of people are able to access the Internet tubes and use them to buy things for the first time?

Yes, indeed, it’s much easier to make money if you have a popular website that was founded back in the 90s and has a ridiculous amount of traffic and incoming links. Just like it’s easier to make money if you inherit $297 kajillion dollars from some rich uncle to start out with. But each and every day people start out on a path with nothing, absolutely nothing, and turn it into something huge, often in just a few years.

So you’ve got no excuse, as far as being late to the affiliate party. It’s just getting started. Hell, invitations haven’t even been sent out yet. Get to work.

As far as not being “interesting” enough or not a “good” enough writer, well, that’s just silly. People are endlessly fascinating. Be yourself. If you’re a crazy kook, be a crazy kook. If you’re the most boring humanoid in the existence of humanoids, that’s okay, just write about something interesting. If you’re boring and writing about something uninteresting, even that’s okay if you’re writing about something that surfers are interested in.

Yes, in a perfect world we would always entertain, engage, and educate our audience, simultaneously, with much vigor. But the simple truth is that you can make money as an affiliate marketer by simply doing any one of those, as long as you do it well.

Let’s look at some random examples of sites that I’d wager are making some pretty good cash, covering a huge spectrum as far as style, content, implementation, you name it:

The SuperStar Squirrel: Words fail me. I’m scared to keep scrolling down, yet I do, despite myself. But it’s got tons of incoming links, gets linked all the times in blogs, and sells merchandise that I imagine has a pretty nice profit margin, and is unique to the content of the site.

Broke Ass Student: Pretty simple site in format and content, but a good example of a straightforward approach that can pay off. If you’re a broke-ass student trying to learn financial lessons to get ahead, blog about it. And tightly integrate Adsense ads into your content and make some money from it.

IamFacingForeclosure: I’m about 95% convinced now that this is entirely concocted to make money via affiliate programs and is not a real story, but either way it’s pretty damn successful, from an affiliate point of view. Push people’s buttons and you’ll get tons of traffic and links. It’s not really about debt or foreclosure at all, if you look past the surface content, but about hammering on hot topics that people instantly respond to (laziness, debt, dishonesty) and building up a huge amount of traffic in a short amount of time.

OrigamiBoulder: Simplest idea in the world, and the product sold probably has a profit margin close to infinity. Notice how the owner also uses the relative crappiness of the site design as an actual selling point, especially with the persona used as the voice of the site.

Million Dollar Homepage: This bastard made $1,000,000 selling freaking pixels on a freaking website that was essentially one page and had no point other than to sell pixels on it. No, really.

 And you can play that game endlessly, as far as site after site that’s found a way to get traffic and monetize it. New sites launch every single day that will go on to make many thousands of dollars for the creator. Another one just went alive, as I’m typing this. And another. And another.

Don’t feel intimidated when you’re starting out, as if you have to find the perfect topic and the perfect voice, or that you’re too late to the party and will never see the success that other have. You can adopt an infinite number of voices, writing about an infinite number of things, in an infinite number of ways, and find a way to make money with any of them.

I’ve never seen any numbers but I imagine there’s an ungodly high death rate of affiliates within the first year of giving it a whirl. There are many reasons why the attrition rate is high, but I’m working on a theory that a leading indicator of why affiliates die an early death is how they answer the following question:

Why do you want to make money through affiliate marketing?

If your answer is “Because I want more money”, congratulations. Pass Go, collect $200.

If your answer is “Because I need more money”, my condolences. Would you like the extra Corpse De-Stinkifier added to your affiliate funeral package?

It’s a subtle difference but it speaks volumes, in many different tongues. Let’s unpack that a bit and see why there’s such a difference between “want” and “need”, and what that has to do with whether you’re ultimately successful or not as an affiliate.

When someone says “I need more money,” what they’re usually really saying is actually more complex, along the lines of “I can’t seem to get ahead, no matter how hard I work. I make decent money at my job but between a mortgage, car payments, kids, and just living life I can’t ever really get ahead. If I could just make enough extra money to pay our credit card bills each month we could finally have some breathing room, eventually paying off all our credit card debt and start saving some money. I’m not an idiot about saving or investing, I just need to find a way to get ahead of the curve for once. Something always seems to crop up, so we just pay the minimum we can on our debt each month, but it keeps growing as the interest is killing us. That’s why I need to make more money through things like affiliate marketing, as it doesn’t cost much at all to get started with that and can potentially produce the extra money I need.”

(Before I start pontificating in annoying, from-on-high fashion, believe me, I’ve been in exactly that spot. Almost everyone has at some point. It’s unfortunately a very natural place to find yourself in these days.)

Look at all the times the word “need” crops up. It’s as if the person doesn’t really have a choice in the matter, as if they’re not so much motivated by their situation but scared of the potential consequences. And they should be scared. Fear is a natural reaction to feeling trapped in a bad spot, just as feeling the urgent need to get out necessarily follows. You need more money to pay off your debt and get out of the hole. You really, really need it. And you need it now.

But the sad truth is that fear really isn’t much of a motivator. It adds a sense of immediate urgency, which can be mistaken for motivation, but if you don’t achieve immediate success at whatever you’re thrown yourself into, you tend to abandon it and look for something else that can rescue you, something to alleviate the fear. Motivation is good; urgency and need for immediate results is bad.

The problem with using affiliate marketing to try to satisfy that need is that it usually takes awhile to see the fruits of your labors. So if your answer is that you need more money, you’re predisposed to likely being in a hurry and not patient enough to plug away for months at the affiliate thing without seeing any substantial income from it. You’d otherwise have a great shot at making money as an affiliate, but you’re hamstrung and more likely to fail because of your surrounding circumstances.

If your answer was that you want more money, well, that’s a different ball of wax entirely. If you don’t need the money and have no internal or external clock that you’re racing against, when you have to make X dollars by a certain date to pay for Y, you’ve got a much better chance at succeeding as an affiliate. Not only that, but you’re also likely hard-wired in other ways for success, by the simple fact that you’ve already escaped the feedback loop to some extent.

So are you doomed to fail if you “need” to make money via affiliate marketing? Of course not.  And, conversely, you’re not guaranteed to succeed just because you have no debts or other pressing fears and want more money. All I’m really trying to do is to slightly peel away some of the layers that separate success and failure in the affiliate world.

One of the biggest reasons I’ve been able to make over $100,000 in my affiliate career actually has nothing at all to do with affiliate marketing. When I got out of grad school and got a decent paying job in the real world, I busted my ass to get out of debt, living in a tiny efficiency apartment and driving a beat-up old pickup my grandparents gave to me. When I got out of debt, I didn’t move and I didn’t buy a new car. I started saving as much as I could for a down payment on a house.

All the while I kept plugging away at the affiliate stuff, because I wanted more money. It frustrated me when I wasn’t making money as fast as I’d have liked, but it didn’t defeat me. People much dumber than myself were making it work, so I kept stubbornly grinding away it, until I started finding things that worked for me. I kept trying new things and constantly dreaming up new ways to make the money I wanted. Most didn’t work but a few did. Of the few that did, most worked moderately well, with a handful working really, really well.

I don’t mean to sound like a blaring infomercial, but affiliate marketing has amazing potential, perhaps more so than any other start-up business out there. The costs are so low to get started and it’s absolutely perfect for people who have a day job yet want to make some additional income on the side, as you can do affiliate work from anywhere, at anytime, and you can scale it to the free time you have to sink into it.

It’s not a magic pill, though, especially if there are other areas in your life that out of whack. Affiliate marketing can’t stop you from spending more than you earn, nor can it cure you for a penchant for shinier, newer cars than any of your friends have. A lot of affiliate success or affiliate failure is actually closely tied to other areas of your life, so try not to look at affiliate marketing in a vacuum, as work in other areas of your life can dramatically improve your odds of making money as an affiliate. 

I have to admit that I’m pretty excited about the upcoming year. You never know what life will throw at you, but I feel like many different factors are perfectly aligned for 2007 to be a pretty exciting (and profitable) year.

2006 was a pretty interesting year for me, especially on the affiliate side of things. More so in the “May you live in interesting times” sense of the word, with everything chugging along nicely until October kneecapped me, then kicked me in the groin, then stood there, laughing at me writhing on the ground in pain. But it never quite managed to kill me, and I suppose there’s some truth in that which doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger.

I think setting goals is always a good thing, but I’m at a bit of a loss as to what they should be, either for this site or in a more general sense. My first impulse was to set a monetary figure to shoot at as far as net income for the year, but that can be a double-edged sword. I’m pretty good about scrambling around and finding ways to make cash in the short term, but have fallen on my face at times in the past as far as taking bigger picture concerns into account, which sometimes require different actions than what might maximize the money you make in any given month.

On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for challenging yourself. It’s easy to hedge and say that I can’t know the future, that I can’t predict what sort of affiliate work I’ll be doing 12 months from now, and/or that I can’t fall into the trap of setting myself up for failure by setting unrealistic goals. That’s a lot of can’ts. Why not instead simply blurt out what I want and then force myself to find a way to make that happen?

• I want to end the year making $3,000/month in net income from affiliate and freelance work. Any Web-related work I do that is outside of my day job goes into this column, but it doesn’t include any income from real estate or income investments in stocks, precious metals, options, etc.

That’s going to take some work, but it’s not impossible. $36,000/year from something I’m doing part-time sounds ridiculous but I’ve easily surpassed that each of the last two years. It’s going to take some scratching and clawing, as far as building up new sites, as well as a lot of work on some of the existing assets I have, that I can squeeze more money out of.

• I want to end the year with either $50,000 in net income from flipping real estate or holding properties worth at least $250,000 (exclusing our primary residence).

This one is more doable, but it’s also connected to the first goal. My wife and I are lucky enough to have decent paying jobs, substantial savings, no kids, very simple tastes, and no debt other than mortgage debt. My plan is to immediately sink every penny I make on the affiliate side into real estate. I finally have all the levers I need to make a fortune in real estate, and the only thing stopping me is fear of the unknown and a fondness for complacency. Screw that. If there’s ever a time in my life to roll the bones and leap, it’s now.

• I want to make at least $1,000 during the year selling art and other stuff I make.

This is kind of a tangent, but the point is that I really enjoy the metalcasting stuff I’ve been doing, and have some cool ideas for welded furniture and bathroom vanities, as well as more mercenary projects to make money such as casting custom hood ornaments and replicas of vintage cabinet hardware, switchplate covers, etc. It’s also something my wife and I do together, so including this is a reminder that I need to fight the tendency to focus too much on the things that make me money, at the expense of other fun things that are much more meaningful in the long run.

Will I hit all those goals? We shall see. I imagine in the end I’ll get pretty close, as far as the overall number you get if you add them up, but I might fall short in one area but make it up elsewhere.

One thing to note, before you accuse me of possessing a time-generating machine, is that I’m in a unique spot as far as my day job goes, which makes some of the seemingly crazy goals above more feasible. I telecommute two days a week, sit at my desk in the office for the other three days with absolutely no oversight at all, and, frankly, have thrown in the towel as far as maintaining any loyalty to HyperGlobalMegaCorp, as far as feeling obligated to give them a dedicated 40 hours+/week in return for a paycheck. I wish it were me being petty and/or selfish but sadly they’ve completely run the company I work for into the ground after acquiring us, pretty much looking to suck the soul and life from everyone at every juncture, with malice aforethought, so don’t feel too badly for them. Long story short, I’ve got a good bit of free time, even when I’m on the clock at the day job, and plan on taking full advantage of it.