Gadooney.com

Weekly Recap

Man, can I get a do-over for February? Or at least have the month back, as I’m not sure exactly where it went, but it’s largely gone-gone-gone, with seemingly little to show for it.

Or, you know, lots to show for it, depending. One thing I forget at times is that I’m essentially starting over with all my affiliate work, after all of my casino and poker related sites came crashing down in the wake of recent US legislation whacking that industry mightily. I fall into the trap of viewing everything through that lens, as far as rushing, pell-mell, to try to make up the money I was previously making, and viewing anything less as a failure.

Which is pretty damn dumb, especially when I spend so much time here preaching patience, acknowledging the fact that it takes much time for your efforts to bear fruit, as far as getting indexed in search engines, acquiring customers, and building traffic. Beating myself up for not instantly achieving beaucoup traffic and riches is, umm, not very realistic or helpful.

At the same time, there is a balance, as far as pushing yourself to constantly get pages and sites out there. Especially if you’re blessed/cursed with a day job and are doing the affiliate stuff on the side. The difficulty is in find a balance, and giving yourself credit for all the things you did accomplish, instead of focusing on what didn’t get done.

In that light, while I cranked out very few pages of content this week, much work was done on Pokahblog.com and Oddsnark.com, as far as getting them ready to open up to a beta test experiment of sorts. I’ve been playing around the idea of being able to offer a community, group blog on assorted topics that’s open to any author, but one that still offers them a chance to potentially make money via Adsense and affiliate programs.

As the owner/admin, I’d basically make the site go, optimize and promote it, provide a way for authors to make money, and give them an easy way to post content. Which is a fairly compelling idea in many ways, as it solves the primary problem for me (getting content onto optimized sites) and for bloggers (having multiple outlets for the content, including commercials ones designed to make them the most money possible). It’s also a potentially nice outlet for people wanting to dip their toes into the affiliate waters but who aren’t quite committed to signing up for a hosting account and setting up a website themselves.

So those are in beta testing now, as I just opened them up a few days ago. Still some kinks to work out but I’ll be curious to see how the experiment turns out. The key, methinks, is going to be whether or not the sites can achieve a certain critical mass, as far as building up enough traffic that authors can see a tangible return for their work. I think it’d be a pretty compelling pitch if someone could jump in, post a lot, and make $50-$100 month from their content, but it’s going to take a lot of traffic to make that a possibility, and a lot of patience from early beta testers.

As far as my personal stuff, I continued to pick away at assorted sites. Still not getting much love from search engines but that’s par for the course at this stage. I’ve got a few new schemings up my sleeve, which I’ll likely detail here soon. Plan for the rest of the month is to bang out some content in assorted places, but, as always, who knows if that’ll end up being the case.

Which Comes First, the Chicken or the Ad?

There are certain issues that you’ll wrestle with every day in the affiliate world, and one of those is advertising. Or, more accurately, if you’re using the correct advertising to make as much as you can from your traffic.

I don’t have much love for the word “monetize” (don’t get me started on other less than concrete buzzwords like “sticky,” “eyeballs,” and “scalability”) but it’s a nice shortcut to describe what affiliates do. You transform traffic to your sites into clicks on certain ads and links. Do it well and you’ll make much money. Do it poorly and you won’t.

The difficulty, though, is that it’s not just a matter of getting traffic and slapping up ads. It can be that easy, in rare instances, but usually it’s not. Typically you’ll need to accumulate targeted, focused traffic that is exposed to integrated ads, links, and products that your focused traffic is inclined to be interested in.

In plain English (and much more simply), you’ll make lots of money advertising mortgage products and services if your traffic is composed of people actively looking to buy a house. Those same ads for mortages will make you jack squat if your traffic is looking for naughty pictures of Britney.

That’s the first level of thought related to ads on your affiliate sites. Once you match up your content with on-topic, related advertising, you get to the second level, which is how the ads are integrated into your site.

Backing up a bit, one common issue that lots of new affiliates wrestle with is when to include ads in their sites. Do you have ads from Day 1 or do you wait until you build some traffic to incorporate ads? Do ads annoy and scare off users that might otherwise hang around your cool, useful site? Should you wait until you get search traffic to start integrating and optimizing ads?

There’s no defnitive answer, but I leans towards including ads and tightly integrating them into the site from Day 1. You’ll have your own learning curve as far as learning how ads work, which programs to use, how to build product links, etc., and the sooner you get on the curve, the better.

There’s also a flip side to not subjecting users to ads in the early days, as you’re prone to piss some of them off later when you flip the switch and all of this obvious advertising suddenly pops up. If the ads are always there, from the first time they hit the site, they tend to simply accept ads as a fact of websites these days.

As far as integrating ads into your site, to some degree it’s a matter of personal choice and determined by the type of site you have. I’m not going to go into all the specific cases and factors, especially when what works for one site might never work for another.

In general, lean towards text ads if you can, as they almost always outperform image ads such as banners. We’ve all become slightly conditioned to subconsciously ignore banner ads on website, as they’re obviously ads, they’re generally the same size and appear in the same general locations, and we’re usually interested in reading the actual content, not the ads.

Thus the beauty of text ads, as they’re embedded in the text and hard to ignore. More importantly, they’re often mistaken for navigational links, so they tend to get clicked much more often than other ads. Yes, I know, slightly sneaky, but your goal isn’t to be nice and informative; your goal is to be nice, informative, and profitable. If you have to sacrifice one of those three elements, ditch nice and stick to informative and profitable.

The more tightly and seamlessly your ads are integrated into your site, the more money you will make. Your goal is to have an informative, content-rich site that is narrowly focused, with a layout that makes it difficult to distinguish from ads, content, and navigational links.

If you’re using Adsense, customize the color and background of your ads so that they blend into the background of your website. Consider using different Adsense formats in different locations, taking into account your navigational links, post format, and other factors.

Problogger.net is a good example, epsecially the Adsense ads just above the first post on the main page. Those look just like navigational links, and they’re topics that someone wanting to make money from blogging would be very inclined to click on. If the format was instead the larger Adsense ads, with the advertising text and URL included, they’d very obviously be ads and wouldn’t get clicked as much as they do when people mistake them for navigational links.

If you’re using third-party affiliate programs that provide you with banners, don’t just use the first one you see. Try to run ads that blend into your site and, in some cases, adjust your layout and design to the ads you want to run. In the past I’ve built entire sites around ads that I wanted to try out, with the layout and design (and content, to some extent) dictated by the ad itself.

Ads are a necessary evil in the affiliate world, so the sooner you make your peace with them, the better.

Making Peace With Certain Affiliate Realities

(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.

Useful WordPress Plugins

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.

Don’t Be Afraid of Getting Sidetracked

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.

Google Adwords CPC Estimator Tool

If you want to get a rough estimate of what you might make per click for running Adsense ads on certain terms on your site, check out the link below:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Put in the keywords you want to check then go to the pull down menu and select “Cost and add position estimates”. Pull in “100″ in the next box as Max CPC and hit the button.

That’ll generate a full list of estimated CPC amounts for certain positioning in Adwords, which you can use to extrapolate what you’d likely receive for each click for those terms on your pages running Google Adsense. The figures are a little bloated, as they’re an estimate of what it’d cost to be at the top of the ads, so it’s not showing what currently is being paid, just what it’d take you to be on top. Google also takes its cut, so you wouldn’t receive that full amount anyway. And for other reasons I’m not quite sure of, the figures for many keywords seem too high in general.

It’s a decent tool, though, to gauge in general how much you might make running Adsense ads on a site devoted to certain keywords and niches.

Pay-Per-Click Affiliate Programs

Pay-per-click (PPC) programs pay affiliates each time a link is clicked on their site. Google Adsense is the most popular PPC program, and in many ways it revolutionized the affiliate marketing arena, as it opened ip a whole new way of making money.

The way PPC programs work is that merchants or advertisers (basically people selling things or trying to draw traffic to their website) sign up, and agree to spend a certain amount of money for each click that is generated by an affiliate. In the Google world, merchants and advertisers sign up at Google Adwords and create a campaign in which they make their ad and set their budget, as far as how much they’re willing to pay per click for certain keywords.

So that’s where the money comes from that pays you, the affiliate, when you display Google text ads on your site and someone clicks on them. Google is the middleman man and pockets some cash each and every time, as they don’t pay you the full amount the merchant or advertiser is paying.

We’re all pretty used to the PPC model these days but the reason it was such a game-changing event when it rolled out is that suddenly affiliates could make money on topics that they could never monetize before. Before PPC, the only way to make money as an affiliate was to refer surfers on your site to a retailer via a link, where they had to buy something, at which point you’d get a piecce of it as commission. But that involves a sale, and it’s notoriously hard to convert surfers to buyers, so it was harder to make money, and you usually only started making real money months down the line when your affiliate site had lots of traffic.

Not so with PPC, as you can immediately start generating income from something as simple as a click on a link, with no purchase required. It also opens up all sorts of areas for affiliate sites, as you simply have to write about a topic that people search on (and that advertisers and merchants bid on, on the Adwords side of things) in order to potentially make money. Suddenly sites about pet rats or the Civil War could be profitable, even if there are no merchants out there with affiliate programs to hawk products for. Create the site, add some Adsense links, and presto, you can make some money from people clicking on the Google ads on your pages.

One thing to be aware of, though, is the potential trade-off of PPC versus traditional affiliate programs. If your site is about home theater systems, you have to be careful that you don’t go with PPC and unintentionally cost yourself tons of money. With a traditional program, you get paid a set commission based on what people you refer buy. For a lot of retailers, it’s typically something like 2-6% commission. Some programs pay you that for the life of the customer, some don’t, the details vary from program to program. What you need to be aware of, though, is that if your affiliate site is geared towards relatively high-ticket items, you probably want to avoid PPC, even though it’ll give you a more immediate return, as far as making money. While it’d be great to make $20/month from Google Adsense clicks, it doesn’t take too many surfers going on to spend lots of money with the retailer to cost you money, as you might otherwise be receiving 5% commission on their purchases for life.

Your monthly earnings are steadier in PPC programs and much more dependable (as they’re really just a function of your overall traffic), but they also don’t have the potential upside that traditional programs do, if you land a few whales that go on to spend tons of money.

So How the Hell Do I Actually Make Money as an Affiliate?

Good question.

There are basically three major ways that affiliates monetize traffic on their sites. I’ll quickly cover them, then ramble on with a few caveats and disclaimers.

1) Pay-per-click: You’re likely familiar with the Google text ads that you see on sites everywhere. What you may not realize is that the owner of the site that displays them gets paid a certain amount each time those ads are clicked. That’s all it takes to get paid, just a simple click. It doesn’t matter whether or not the surfer who clicked the ad goes on to buy something or not, doesn’t matter how long they stay on the site that is linked to the ad, all that matters is if the link is clicked. This is called a pay-per-click (PPC) model, and while programs other than Google Adsense offer it, the vast majority of affiliates who want to use this type of program use Google Adsense.

2) Traditional affiliate programs: These are programs that pay affiliates either a flat fee or a percentage of the total amount purchased when a surfer clicks through a link to their affiliate program and then buys something. In this model, the surfer must whip out their credit card and buy something. If you get 162,182,192 clicks but no one buys anything, you make absolutely nothing.

3) Leads and quotes: These programs are common in the car buying and online colleges arena, where you typically are paid a flat fee for everyone you refer who fills out a Web survey page to get a car quote, a catalog of college classes, etc. While you don’t get paid for each click, surfers also don’t have to physically buy anything for you to make money.

(You might be wondering why I’m not mentioning the old-fashioned method of selling advertising space on your blog, either through direct contact with potential advertisers or through a program like Text Link Ads. Yes, indeed, that’s another viable way that people make money from websites, but it’s a different beast from affiliate marketing in many ways. it’s also a case of getting the cart before the horse, as you need to build traffic first before you can make any real money using those methods.)So that’s the nuts-and-bolts details, as far as the major ways to make money as an affiliate. The real question, then, is which one is right for you?

Stay tuned for an in-depth look at each of the options above, as far as the thought process you should run through when deciding what type of affiliate model you’d like to target on your site.