Gadooney.com

I talked about this a bit back in the early days of this site, but the last six months or so have been a bit odd for me, as an affiliate marketer. I’d put almost all of my affiliate eggs in the casino and poker basket the last few years, which was unceremoniously tipped over last October with the passage of the UIGEA.

Since then I’ve been casting about, launching new affiliate sites, trying a bit of this, a bit of that, and slowly rebuilding my monthly income. With an emphasis on “slowly”, as it’s been a bit of a grind, especially since I was pretty spoiled in the past with some of the juicy CPA payments from casino and poker sites.

While my wallet may be lighter, the experience has been good, though, and I feel like I’m expanding the bag o’ tricks, even if it’s a niche or idea that I don’t pursue full-bore moving forward. Promoting eBooks falls directly into that category, as far as something I’d never done before, that made me a little money, and is not a bad option to have in your affiliate toolbox.

I read an article on EarnersBlog a few months back about promoting eBooks on Clickbank, which provides an affiliate program to promote a variety of eBooks and earn a commission as an affiliate whenever someone buys the eBook.

The idea is fairly simple, but with a few twists. Sign up at Clickbank, search for eBooks that you’d like to promote, and write up some reviews for the eBooks, praising their virtues. 

The ultimate style and tone is up to you, as far as whether you attempt to be an impartial reviewer, an enthusiastic devotee to the eBook, etc. Over-the-top enthusiasm worked best for me, but your mileage will vary here.

Do some basic keyword research first, after selecting an eBook to promote. If it’s a guide to power leveling on World of Warcraft, poke around with your favorite keyword research tool to find phrases to target that are highly searched on, such as “WoW Horde leveling guide”, “World of Warcraft leveling guide”, etc.

I wrote three different reviews for each product, each targeting and optimized for a different phrase that was highly searched on. Don’t write an epic tome as far as the review, just make sure it’s well-optimized for the subject. I typically wrote three or four paragraphs, from 300-500 words each, with many links to the eBook embedded throughout.

The next step is the slightly unusal one, as far as publishing your reviews. Typically you’d put them on a website of yours and wait days/weeks/months for them to get indexed by search engines, etc. In this case, though, you publish them on a third-party site, with USFreeAds and Squidoo being good options.

The reason you don’t publish them on your own site is that both of the above sites are regularly spidered with new content published on them almost immediately getting indexed and ranked well for even competitive terms, due to the high PageRank and authority that both sites pass on to content. Your eBook reviews should be ranked and getting clicks in search engines within days, often grabbing top three spots in Google right off the bat. It would likely take weeks to months to replicate that same effect if you’d published the content on your own site, unless you’re sitting on a very authoritative PR6 or above site.

Once your reviews are indexed and producing search traffic, it’s basically a numbers game. If you write good, compelling copy and get enough traffic, you’ll inevitably get some conversions. It depends on the eBook and your marketing skills, but some of my best reviews were converting at 1 sale for every 100 clicks, which isn’t bad at all for a slightly schlocky product like an eBook.

Keep in mind, too, that your out-of-pocket expenses are very, very low. You don’t even need a website of your own, as you’re publishing the content on a third party site. Posting on Squidoo is free and USFreeAds charges a nominal monthly fee for a basic account, under $10/month, and you’ll make that back plus some with your first sale.

So what’s the catch, and why am I speaking about my efforts here in the past tense? The biggest drawback for me was that while the reviews initially ranked well and got gobs of traffic, they pretty quickly fall out of those top spots in search engine results. Even with extra effort to build a variety of optimized incoming links to the reviews, I couldn’t make them stick in search engines.

It also was fairly time consuming, as far as writing the reviews themselves, and Clickbank has all sorts of issues, from lack of support to track clicks to more serious issues about not crediting affiliates for all sales. Unfortunately, there’s not a good alternative to them, if you want to promote eBooks, which is the only reason I’m mentioning them here.

In the end I made a bit over $500, so it wasn’t a total loss. I probably invested 20 hours or so in te project, so a $25/hr earn rate isn’t too bad at all. What ultimately turned me off the project was more psychological, as I didn’t necessarily enjoy writing the schlocky, over-the-top reviews for eBooks that I’d never read and were more than often a waste of money for the poor sap that bought them. I also didn’t feel as if I was working towards anything, due to the fact that the content was published on another site that I was building links and traffic for, even when I was making a bit of scratch for my efforts.

Those issues aside, it’s not a bad technique to have in reserve, as far as a way to make some affiliate money with a very quick turnaround. If you’re willing to keep banging out the reviews and constantly put up new ones to replace the old ones that fall out of search results, you can make some decent money, without waiting for months for your content production efforts to really kick in and start making you some money.

While I’m not out of the crazy-bust woods just yet, I can sort of see daylight, peeking through the trees. Many apologies to my 4 faithful readers who keep checking back, looking for new content here.

One nice thing about the somewhat forced hiatus from my online affiliate scheming while I tackled umpteen other projects was the reminder that one nice aspect of affiliate marketing is that you don’t even have to be driving the mothership actively to make money. Yes, indeed, you need to always be hustling new content and getting stuff out there, but things will indeed click along on their own for quite awhile, making you money, once you get lots of irons in the fire. I actually had my best month in quite awhile in April, and barely had time to add much of anything to any of my sites.

Still a bit pressed for time, but plans are to ease back into the posting saddle here. I’ve got all sorts of ideas for posts, and the plan is to get a little more specific and advanced, now that anyone following along at home has got the basic chops down, as far as getting sites up, picking niches, comfortable with banging out content, and all that good stuff.