Gadooney.com

If the title isn’t clear enough, the purpose of this site is pretty straightforward: to show you how to make money via affiliate marketing.

That’s it. Plain and simple. There you go. Nothing to it.

Oh, wait. You mean you wanted to know more about me? Well, umm, crap. That’s a lot harder.

As far as the basic stat line, here you go:
32 years old, married, no kids; a useless BA in English from Colorado College and an even more useless MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas; possessor of a boring, soul-sucking corporate day job at what quite possibly is the worst run yet somehow massively profitable company in the history of the world.

Here’s a picture of me and my wife Sarah:

If you’re wondering about the story that led me up to this point, as far as why I’m babbling on about affiliate stuff here, and how I arrived at the point, well, here goes:

Back in ancient times (mid-2000 or so) a friend I went to grad school with approached me with a business idea. I’ve always been the scheming type and interested in investing and other sundry business stuffs, but had been pretty busy going to college and grad school, pretending that I wanted to write poetry and fiction and drink absinthe all day in some forgotten former British colony.

My friend Kerry’s business idea was to create and sell audio porn. Or, you know, “erotica”. Whatever.

I agreed to give it a whirl and suddenly we were co-owners of an audio porn business named Swell Audio. I mean, umm, an audio erotica business. Exactly.

Now that you’ve stopped laughing, it actually wasn’t the worst idea in the world, as at the time there just weren’t any books-on-tape/CD targeted at the adult market. I’d always wanted to start a business so I thought it’d be good experience and produce some interesting stories. And it was. And it did.

We never really made any money but we didn’t lose any money, either. I got my feet wet with regards to assorted business stuff and, more importantly, learned some basic web design skills under my belt, as we couldn’t afford to pay someone to do a website, so I ended up buckling down and learning enough to put together a basic website.

When we didn’t immediately make a bazillion dollars and running a business turned out to be actual work, the other parties involved lost interest and we stopped producing new stuff and basically closed up shop, except for digital sales via iTunes and other music stores that basically run on auto-pilot.

Fast-forward to mid-2001 or so and I’m single, bored, have lots of spare time on my hands, and a working knowledge of HTML. I also had licensed a lot of naughty content for use on the Web, as we’d populated the Swell Audio website at one point with a lot of porny eye candy. I’d read about some affiliates who’d made many grandusands of American dollas as affiliates for porn sites, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

I did that for a year or two, making just enough to keep me intersted in plugging away at it, but never really making serious money. All of the affiliate stuff was part-time, as I had a day job, so I wasn’t trying to pay the bills and was free to experiment with different things and muck around and learn on the fly. I had a few months where I made $500 or so, but on average I was making $200-$300/month, and putting in a lot of time.

Frustrated finally with my inability to make real headway in the porn affiliate world, In 2003 I started trying different things, building sites for all sorts of stuff like legal weed marijuana alternatives, pet medication, survivalist gear, you name it. And, lo and behold, I finally started making some real money, once I got out of the uber competitive field I’d been previously competing in.

I’d launched a car buying quote site that was geared towards city-specific searches, such as “Austin Mazda” or “Houston Cadillac”, and so on. I’d actually forgotten about it until I suddenly noticed in my affiliate stats that I’d made $200 from it one month. Poking around in my traffic stats, I’d managed to land in the top search positions for pretty much every page I’d built, which at the time was just pages for all common car manufacturers coupled with the terms “Austin” and “Houston”.

Hmm, my monkey brain thought. If I’m making that much from just two cities, I wonder how much I could make if I built pages for 200 cities? I managed to cobble together some javascripts to make unique pages of content for pretty much a gazillion cities, mass produced a ton of pages, and was making $1,000-$2,000/month, from just that one crappy site. That gravy train ended pretty quickly when Google tweaked its algorithm to combat sneaky monkeys like myself, but I finally had demonstrable proof that I could make real money from the affiliate stuff.

I kept noodling away through late 2004, making between $500-$1,000/month from assorted sites, launching new ones here and there, shuttering old ones, with no single focus or hugely successful site. I’d been bitten by the poker bug, had just met my wife-to-be, and didn’t have a ton of extra free time as in the past for the affiliate stuff.

I’d started up a poker blog to track my progress with that and at some point thought, Hmm, maybe I can make some money as an affiliate for poker and casino sites, and started poking around into that idea. Lo and behold, those programs paid a crapload of money for referred players. So I started incorporating affiliate links into my poker blog and wrote some guides to playing poker on different sites for bonuses and special promotions, and started to make some decent money.

Things really picked up, though, when I started writing guides to profiting from online casino promotions. At the time, lots of online casinos would give you free money when you deposited, and only required that you wager a relatively small amount. Better yet, you could play blackjack and bet the minimum per hand. With the low house advantage, it was actually very profitable for you as the player, as you could sometimes make $30-$40/hour, simply by playing blackjack fo $1/hand and following basic strategy.

So it was an easy sell to surfers, describing my own experience and the money I made (plus, you know, it’s gambling, and lots of people like to gamble), and the affiliate programs for the online casinos were paying me up to $200/player as an affiliate, for every person I referred. Which adds up. Quickly.

Parts of early 2005 were pretty much a fantasyland for me as an affiliate, as I had a couple of months where I made more than $10,000. All from encouraging people to gamble. Like all gravy trains, this one developed hitches in its stride, as at a certain point the affiliate programs would simply cut me off, since they were paying me a ton to refer players to them, but I was only referring savvy advantage players that would get the free bonus money, playing perfect strategy to minimize their risk, and withdraw their deposit and the extra bonus money as profit as soon as they could.

I managed to swap out programs for awhile, add new programs that cropped up, etc., but I knew the writing was on the wall. When the programs would cut me off, they’d simply move me over to a revenue sharing plan, where I was only paid if a player I referred lost money, and was no longer paid a set amont per referred player. I assumed this would eventually bring a halt to the mad cash I was making, but I started making money from time to time even with those programs that’d switched me over to revenue sharing. People like to gamble. So even when I recommended that people be smart about it, some would still bet it all on black. And deposit more. And lose that. And deposit more.

So the rest of 2005 and 2006 was spent rolling out lots of different affiliate sites targeting the online gambling niche, as I was making good money on a pretty regular basis. I never hit $10,000/month again but I was consistently making more than what I did at my day job, each and every month. Until Bill Frist bent over the online gambling world in October 2006 and pushed through legislation that scared most online gambling sites into refusing to allow US players to play on their sites. Since 90% or so of my referred players were from the US, this pretty much wiped me out overnight, as far as my affiliate income.

I spent a goodly number of weeks being pretty pissed and depressed, since nearly all of my active affiliate sites had been online gambling sites, and I was back to square one after shuttering or selling most of them. I still had a few old sites kicking around and some income trickling in from non-US players, but it was only about $500/month in income. Which is nice, don’t get me wrong, but a big hit from where I was at just a few months before. I wasn’t sure if I had the energy to get back into the affiliate game, or if I’d be better served taking the money I’d saved (thankfully I never quit my day job, so the bulk of the affiliate income I’d yanked down went straight into savings and investments) and get into sometime completely new such as investing in real estate.

Which pretty much brings us up to the present, as far as launching this site in late December 2006. Obviously, I decided to suck it up and deal and get back into the affiliate game, chalking it up asa lesson in the value of diversification and not putting all of your eggs in one basket.