Vacation = Money.

Last entry I wrote about one of the negatives of working from home as an affiliate marketer: the ups & downs of income and how that can be a bit of a roller coaster.

This entry I'm going to write about one of the great positives of being an affiliate marketer: Not having to ask for time off.

I'm going on a week's vacation to see family on Monday. I didn't have to ask my boss for a week off. I just decided it was time for a vacation. So I'm taking one.

What's really great about this is that I'll likely make pretty much the same amount of money this coming week whether I am here working every day or on vacation. Why? Because my sites are already set up to make me money. I don't have to nurse them every day.

Sure if I took off too long of time and didn't send any new links in and didn't update them with any new content I'd eventually see a big drop off in income but it's likely things could continue going pretty well for quite some time without much intervention by me. I can take breaks when I want to and not have it be a big deal. This is a very cool thing!

I'm not working to make money TODAY in most instances, I'm working to build money making machines. To build websites that will bring in money every day whether I'm there to update them or not.

Do you want to get started on the same road I'm on? Here's a quick step by step.

#1 Find a niche (target keywords) that has the following attributes:

A) Good amount of search traffic. People are searching for it, whatever it is.
B) There's a good amount of money in it & there's good related affiliate products that you can market to the people that come to your website.
C) Not an overwhelming amount of competition. It's better to start out in a smaller niche. You'll have a better shot, especially your first time out, by not going after the big dogs. People make the mistake of going after "diet" when they should instead go after "natural diet." This is just an example. You'll have to do some research here! (Try Keyword Elite for keyword/niche research.)

#2 Get a domain & a web host. It's very important that you start building power to your own domain now. You are trying to build something tangible. I do not advise you waste your time with a free blogspot blog. If you are serious about making money online I believe you need your own domain. HostMonster.com is recommended. You can get your domain and your web host in one move with them. They are very affordable and they have a great service (I use them myself.) Most good .com domains are taken but try your best to find one. Try putting "the" or "my" in front of a domain name that you wanted but was taken. www.GoDaddy.com can be a great place to search for a domain name (they will offer you hints along the way.) I don't recommend you host through them but they can be a cool place to buy your domains, that way you can easily move them from web host to webs host in the future.

#3 Start building content. Blogs are an easy way to get started. Why not create a blog about your topic? If you are not an HTML master this is an easy way to get started. You can use Blogger or WordPress for free.

#4 Start building links. Analyze your competition (SEO Elite.) Find out what kind of links they have. Do what they are doing, but do it better.

My favorite link building technique is article submissions. Why? I think it's a long lasting "natural" and organic way of building links in. It's contributing content to the internet so I think it's something you can feel good about doing. Not only will it help your SEO rankings (the links into your site) but it will also help you get some traffic. Here are some article submission ideas to get you started: JetSubmitter & ISnare.

Get started following the above plan and soon you can be taking a vacation whenever you want to, just like me.

Ups & Downs

The crazy thing about affiliate marketing (especially if you make most of your money with big commission items like I do) is how up and down your earnings can go day to day. You can make huge sums of money one day and nothing the next. It's important not to get too high or too low with these ups and downs.

It's important to just keep creating (or buying) quality original content for your websites and to keep working on getting quality links in to your pages. Do the things that will bring you success. Celebration (of the ups) and worry (about the downs) will not bring you success.

It really does no good to worry about the daily ups and downs. I used to keep a chart of my money made each day. I no longer do that. I now do it monthly. I've actually seen a large increase in my earnings since I've done that. This could be just a coincidence but I think it's at least part of the cause. Why? Because I used to be constantly checking my stats and worrying about not making a sale for any given period of time. That's wasted time that could be spent actually doing something constructive!

Stop Obsessing About The PageRank Toolbar

Unless you make a sizable portion of your income selling links you really shouldn't care that much about the PageRank toolbar.

PR is not how Google decides their SERPS. All you need to do is do a few searches for anything on Google to see that quite clearly.

While it is true that PR is important as far as how often your site gets cached by Google, you don't need to see the little green toolbar to know how often your site is being cached. Just check the cache a few times a week and you'll get a good idea of how often Google is coming to your site.

All the time you spend fretting about the PR update you could be spending creating quality content for your websites. Forget about the PR toolbar.

Now if you do sell links, yes, I can understand why you are so worried about the PR toolbar update. But Google also understands this. I would not be surprised at all if "putting the fear" into link sellers is a big part of their delay in updating the PR toolbar.

Over $600 Today In Affiliate Commissions

I'm doing a little celebrating tonight. I've made it over the $500 for affiliate commissions in one day mark for the first time today. I've been close before, in fact I made $470 just last Friday but this is the first time I've actually hit this mark. Hell there's some time left in the night too, I could reach $600!

Here's a breakdown of my earnings today:

3 sales & $270 commissions with OA Internet (sex enhancement products)

1 sale for a $180 commission with Leading Edge Cash (sex enhancement products)

1 sale for a $27 commission with a Clickbank product.

2 more sales for a total of $52 more dollars with a couple of other affiliate programs.

Alright, this is kind of awesome. I was just double checking the amount made with OA Internet to make sure it's right. It's not right anymore. I just made another sale with them to raise my total to $350. That means I've made it over $600 today overall. I just changed the title of this blog post to reflect the higher amount.

Yeah, so today's been a good day.

I know just reading about the money I've made won't do you much good (except to know that yes, you can make a lot of money with affiliate marketing) so I want to give you some advice as well.

I did want to call these tips. But they aren't necessarily tips. Just things to think about (and act on!) to help you succeed with affiliate marketing.

#1 Over 90% of my sales come from organic traffic. I do very little in the way of PPC. In fact I currently spend less than $100 on PPC per month. Too many people think that PPC is the only way to make a lot of money. People think it's the easy way. Yes you can make a ton of money if you get really good at PPC but it's a lot of work and a lot of headaches. You also need a good amount of money to really get started with it because you will most likely lose money when you first start. Here's a Google AdWords EBook if you insist on getting into the PPC game. I used to make all of my money with PPC before I decided to move into SEO. I really wish I had started with SEO earlier because the earlier the better.

#2 SEO takes patience but it has great rewards. Things that are worth doing often take time. Don't take the "get rich quick" route. Build quality websites with quality ORIGINAL content. Instead of making 1000 BS sites with lame duplicate content, build 5 really good sites. I'd tell you to make just one but that's not what I do and I do think it is a good idea to diversify somewhat. Plus, I'd get bored working on only one project. I have more than 5 sites by the way... But that's partly because I help other people with their sites like my girlfriend and my sister.

The most satisfying thing about SEO and quality website creation is how it builds upon itself. With PPC it's like being the gerbil running in the wheel and never really getting anywhere. Personally I hate that feeling.

#3 White Hat Works. You don't need to break the rules to succeed. You don't need to buy links to succeed. You don't need to spam people's forums or send spam emails to succeed. Bend the rules? Maybe a little bit.

#4 Products with big commissions rule. I love being able to make over $600 on a total of just 8 sales. I'm not saying you can't make a lot of money with smaller commission items, of course you can and many people do. I'm just telling you what has worked best for me.

#5 The sex enhancement market is booming. They are easy products to market and they have huge commissions, pretty cool combination. I highly recommend OA Internet and Leading Edge Cash.

#6 Be wary of advice from "Gurus." Most of these guys only make money selling stuff to other people who are trying to make money. The other day I saw a guy on the Digital Point forums talking about how he was going to write & market a Clickbank eBook on how to make money online even though he had only made $40 online in his whole life.

Now I don't think all of the eBooks in Clickbank are completely useless but if they are the "get rich quick" kind then they are probably are close to useless. I actually first got into internet marketing through a clickbank eBook. Itt was about starting a drop shipping business which I never got into because it seemed like too much work and I don't like dealing with customers. But this drop shopping book had a small section about affiliate marketing and that intrigued me greatly. It was less than a week after that that I had started making commissions online. I was using AdWords and sending visitors directly to my affiliate links which is much more difficult to do these days. That was February of 2005.

I didn't get rich from that eBook but I did learn something from it. If you buy an internet marketing eBook to learn something then you may not be disappointed. If you buy one because you think you are going to learn some secret formula to huge riches, you will be very disappointed.

#7 Article marketing works (and it's cheap.) I love to use ISnare because it saves me a lot of time. With ISnare I can submit articles and have them be picked up by many other sites. Yes there is a small fee, but it's definitely worth it. Jet Submitter is a great service because it can help you get a lot of unique articles out there and it can also help you get a lot of deep links. I'm not that big on article submitting software myself (too time consuming) but if you are going to use it then the software made by the guy who made SEO Elite & Keyword Elite (and yes I own both) is the way to go.

Article Submission Links:

ISnare
Jet Submitter
Article Submitter Software

#8 Hiring freelancers is a great idea. I'm doing this more and more. Once you have the funds to hire people to do things like write articles for you, do it. You should be spending your time doing things that you can't get other people to do. If someone else can do it, hire them. Your time is your most important asset.

GetAFreelancer.com

Very Best Blogs - The Blog Directory

I bought the domain VeryBestBlogs.com some time ago (early 2006) with the idea of eventually making it into a blog directory of some kind. I became distracted by many other projects and put it off and put it off again. But I've finally got it up and running. It still needs work as far as the design goes (I'm having a custom logo/banner made for it) but I'm pretty happy with how it looks so far: The Blog Directory. I did not use any sort of category dump or anything like that. This is all done "by hand."

The idea behind this is that I want it to be a real resource for end users. I think this idea is somewhat rare in the directory building world. I want it to be a place where people go to find a good blog on whatever subject they are interested in. There are so many spammy, made for adsense, or otherwise just BS blogs out there that I think this blog directory could be a real resource for real people.

My blog directory will not accept anyone who pays for a review and there will be no refunds for those who pay for a review and are not included. This is very important because it emphasizes the point that I am not selling links. I am selling time. In particular the time it takes to do a good review of a blog. It takes a lot of time and some money to make a good blog directory so that review money is necessary for the life of the directory. A review charge also keeps spam and BS blogs from submitting.

I've read that many other directories out there accept anyone who submits a link if they pay for it. I don't think at that point it's really a directory, that's just a link farm. The whole point of a directory should be to highlight & categorize only the best sites.

I've read a lot about Google coming down hard on directories, but I think they are only upset about them from the stand point of directories that "sell PR." If that's not the focus of your directory and you perform real reviews of the sites being submitted to your directory then I think that directory actually helps the search engines to display more relevant results. And I think that Google actually LIKES quality directories.

Why I Don't Buy Links

Unlike many other SEO marketers I am not in the business of buying links. Although I know it has worked very well for many SEO marketers, I just can't bring myself to pay for links and it's not just because Google has come out so strongly against paid links.

Full disclosure: I have paid for links a couple of times. But I didn't like the way it felt and I haven't done it since. Forgive me Google Gods!

The Reasons:

1. Uncertainty. I have no way of knowing that may link will remain after I pay for it. There are many unscrupulous website owners out there who will gladly take your money for a paid link and then just as gladly remove your link later. Or they may add a "nofollow" attribute which basically makes your link worthless in the eyes of Google anyway. There's also the chance that the website you bought links on will be sold and the new owner will remove all of the old links or perhaps turn the site into something else entirely. Or the current owner may revamp the site with no concern for the people who have bought links. All of this uncertainty makes me not want to spend money on links even if they are "permanent." I don't want to have to keep an eye on all of these sites to see if my links are still up, that's way too time consuming and distracting.

2. Paying For Links Monthly/Yearly. A lot of people buy links monthly/yearly and to me that's just crazy. You are pretty much putting yourself in a situation where you have to continue paying this person for the rest of your website's life. If you stop paying then your link disappears and this looks very bad in the search engines. How about this scenario: You pay $100 a month for 3 years ($3600) for a link from a website and they suddenly raise their price to $500 a month. Or they suddenly decide they are changing the website and are no longer offering to sell a link to you. All of that money down the drain, isn't it? The argument against that is that you could have already made that much money from the link because of how it effected the search engine results. And don't get me wrong, there are some solid arguments for buying links from places like text-link-ads but it's just not for me. If I were to ever buy links it would be only the permanent variety. I hate the idea of owing someone monthly or yearly just to keep my link on their site.

3. Google. They are cracking down on paid links. Google seems to think that paid links are the work of the devil and are trying to devalue sites that sell and buy links. While I'll agree with the devil's advocates that say if you are smart (not so obvious about buying/selling links) you can probably still get away with doing it. But I don't really like to be on Google's bad side. They are too powerful and control too much of the market. I'll try to play by their rules as much as possible. What's the point of paying a lot of money for links if Google ends up just taking all of their value away? Yahoo, MSN? Maybe. I guess if you feel confident about the return a link can bring you, it could be worth it. It's all business after all.

4. Peace Of Mind. The above three reasons all roll together for this one. I find it much more peaceful not buying links. I like to build links in a more organic long term sort of way so that my site's link popularity is building up with a strong foundation. I feel buying links is sort of like building a house of cards. Building links more naturally frees up energy from worrying about whether my links are still up and whether Google is going to devalue them and all of the other worries that come with buying links. The natural way is the peaceful way.

The Alternatives:

Link building is extremely important for internet marketing success. So if I'm not buying links, how do I get them?

1. Article Submissions. I'm a big believer in article submissions. Establish your site as a source of information. Articles can bring you quality links back to your website along with a small amount of traffic (it can be very high quality though.)

Check out the following methods for article submission:

ISnare
JetSubmitter
Article Submitter Software

You may also wish to try to directly contact high quality sites in your niche or a related niche to see if they would like to host your one of a kind article for free. If your article is of high quality they may jump at the chance. Don't emphasize that you want a link back to your site as this will make them feel dirty. A link back to your site is standard procedure with an article from any reputable site. Don't get me started on the sites that take articles from places like ISnare and don't include the article resource links. I try not to worry about them, they'll get what's coming to them sooner or later!

2. Directory Submissions. Although Google is coming down hard on a lot of directories, I think you can still succeed in getting some strong links back to your website if you submit to quality directories. A quality directory does not guarantee inclusion for payment (that would be a paid link.) Any payment to a directory should be for a review, not for inclusion. V7N is an example of such a high quality directory. Make sure the directory is #1 for for a Google search of their own name before submitting! If they don't even show up for their own name then you know that Google is penalizing them and they aren't worth your time and certainly not worth your money for a review.

3. Link Exchanges. Google has also come down hard on link exchanges. But I think if you keep your link exchanges RELEVANT you will be fine. I suggest exchanging links only with those in your niche and only with sites that offer quality content. I recommend using Link Machine to keep track of your link exchanges. You can automatically remove anyone who takes down their link to you. You can also mix up where your back links go to (including deeplinks) and what the link text is. It's a completely customizable system so you can set it up to be unique to your site. I plan on adding it to this site soon (I already use it on many of my other sites.) Only internet marketing sites will be included.

4. Press Releases. This can be a great way to get lots of back links fast. Of course you have to write a good press release to make it worth your time (and money.) You have to come up with a good newsworthy angle on your website/product in order to have success.

5. Social Bookmarking. You can get good backlinks using social bookmarking services although many of them are "nofollow." It's also a great way of getting traffic. Check out the AddThis button at the bottom of this blog post for an example of what I'm talking about (and go ahead and submit it...) I highly recommend this AddThis button, it's a great way to include all of the SB sites without cluttering up your site. Some of the best SB sites are reddit.com, digg.com, & stumbleupon.com. I also usually include netscape.com on this list but they've recently become propeller.com, they should still be a good choice though.

6. Link Bait/Viral. This often works in conjunction with social bookmarking. You write a great blog entry or article and you submit it to social bookmarking sites. This is where it can be seen by many other people and if they like what they read, they may go ahead and link to it! I think this is the most "natural" and most "in the spirit of the internet" way to get great back links. It's also a great way to think because it will make you think about that old thing called "quality content." This is necessary because you will have no success with link bait/viral marketing without some very good content.

7. Quality Blog Comments. Don't spam. I'm talking about leaving comments on blogs that are in your niche. I'm talking about leaving quality on topic comments. While most blog comments are rel="nofollow" - I think these comments still have a positive effect on search engine results (at least Yahoo/MSN) and you can certainly get good quality traffic from them.

8. Forums. Don't spam. Join a forum in your niche and write on topic. Don't join just to spam your website. In fact I recommend you never mention your website in your posts, I know as a forum owner that I don't take kindly to that at all. Just put your website in your signature and speak intelligently and informatively on topics related to your website (which since you are in a forum related to your niche also relates to the forum, of course.) These links are normally not "nofollow" so you can get some "link juice" from them. But mainly you can get quality traffic.

My Best Week This Year (So Far...)

This (Monday the 16th through Sunday the 23rd of September '07) has been my best money making week of the year. I've earned over $1700 this week. That's all profit, which is important to note because I've noticed a lot of people in the internet marketing world give you their total amount earned without saying how much they spend. Like, "I made $99,000!" but not mentioning that they spent $95,000 to make it.

While I don't want to sound like I'm bragging because I know compared to a lot of internet marketers $1700 in a week is nothing much. But I am proud that my work is paying off and things seem to be moving forward at a very good speed. To me $1700/week is pretty darn good money and I know to a lot of people just getting started in internet marketing it sounds really good. I also feel like I've accomplished a lot considering I've also only been in the SEO game for about 10 or 11 months now and SEO is how I make 95% (or more) of my money these days.

I used to be a PPC only guy but I grew tired of the constant cycle of dealing with the whims of AdWords & Yahoo Search Marketing. I used to think SEO was too much work and too long term. And it does take a lot of work and a lot of PATIENCE. I'm making money now based on work I did many months ago. But the great thing about SEO is your work can snowball. You aren't constantly running in circles, you actually make progress with SEO. I love seeing my sites grow and become more popular and have more readers and have more results in the search engines. Plus when you create quality sites it's nice to know you are actually doing something that people may enjoy.

What have been my biggest money makers of this week? OA Internet & Leading Edge Cash. They are both great sex enhancement product affiliate programs. OA Internet has better conversion rates & commission % but LEC has a far greater amount of products to promote and a better affiliate interface. I recommend signing up with both of them.

What are the steps to success with affiliate marketing SEO style? First get your own domain & your own web host. Often you can take are of this in one step with a webhost like HostMonster.com

The sooner you get your site up the better. Google (and the other search engines) love OLD sites. The older the better. Of course they only know about your site if they find it linked on some other site they check. So it's important to get some links into your site.

Which brings me to the next topic. Building links. You need to get lots of links back to your site to have success. You can try buying links but I don't really recommend it. And I personally don't do it. But you should note that I'm in the minority among SEO people when it comes to that. Most do buy links and they do have success with it. I don't like buying links though and not only because Google is so anti paid links. But really that's a rant for another time.

My favorite way to do link building is through article submissions. Write an interesting article (or have someone write you an interesting article) on a subject related to your website and submit the article (which includes links back to your site, usually in the "author resource" section) using these services:

ISnare
JetSubmitter
Article Submitter Software

My main advice is to get to your website up and some links to it as soon as possible. Then you can start working on getting the best quality content on your website. But don't make the mistake of waiting till you have a bunch of perfect content to put your site up. Do it now!

Peter North / Male Enhancement Affiliate Program

Peter North may not sound like he has anything to do with internet marketing but celebrities can be a huge marketing tool. Look at all of the celebrities marketing BS on TV (Jessica Simpson/ProActiv comes to mind...)

If you know who Peter North is already skip ahead to the next paragraph. If you don't then you probably don't watch a lot of porn. He's a huge male porn star, probably the second most well known in the biz after Ron Jeremy. And interestingly enough the AdWords traffic estimator shows nearly 10 times as many people searching for Peter North as for Ron Jeremy. That doesn't seem likely but even if it's only close to the truth, it show sthat his name is quite valuable. It's also worth noting that Peter North is known for his great skills sexually which may make his endorsement worth more in the male enhancement market than Jeremy's as Jeremy is often seen more as a punchline these days despite his enormous... size (penis) or maybe because of his enormous size (belly.)

I've recently signed up as an affiliate for the male enhancement product Virilix which is endorsed by Mr. North himself. Their affiliate interface isn't great but neither is OAInternet's and I make a ton of money with them. They pay a solid 40% commission and they've got a good looking website and a great spokesman. I'm feeling pretty good that I'm going to be able to make some good money promoting this product. Join me in promoting Virilix.

OAINTERNET - My Biggest Money Maker

Right now I'm making more money with OAINTERNET than any other affiliate program.

***Please Note That Promoting OAINTERNET Means Promoting Sex Enhancement Products. If you have some sort of moral objection to promoting these sorts of products then move along! This is not for you.***

Why do I make so much money with OAINTERNET?

Two Big Reasons:

1. Huge Commissions: I can make up to $200 on a single sale. My average commission with them this month so far? $88. For the year my average commission is $75. I've been working recently on directing customers towards the higher payout purchases in order to raise my average commission. You make at least a 50% commission on all products.

2. Great Conversions: This month (during the "summer slowdown" that's supposed tob e happening) my conversion rate is 1 in 37 uniques which is an improvement on my conversion rate for the year of 1 in 50 uniques. This means that for every unique visitor I've sent them this month I've made $2.38! Pretty nice.

Now huge commissions and great conversions don't mean that much if you can't find the traffic. But there's plenty of traffic in this market. Men are very insecure when it comes to certain areas. Men are as insecure about their penises as women are about their weight! It's the great American way, make people feel crap about themselves so they buy your product! It's marketing! ... OK So maybe it's not exactly helping the world. But that's capitalism.

If you want to make some cash exploiting men's insecurities start promoting OAINTERNET products.

AdBrite

I've used AdBrite in the past and I'd had mostly very poor results with them (both as an advertiser and a publisher) but it's been over a year since I've tried them and I've heard that they've moved in a better direction since then. I was just visiting their site for the first time in a long time and they've got some pretty cool new features. The coolest of which have to be InVideo & BritePic.

InVideo allows you to place ads within your own videos and BritePic does the same for pictures. If you are a publisher with a lot of videos & photos I think this could be a huge money maker.

You'll have to check out their section on InVideo to get the full understanding of how it works. One of the things I like best about it is that when people embed your InVideo videos on their websites they will be clickable. Big deal you say? YouTube videos are clickable too. The big difference is that these clicks bring the user to YOUR website instead of YouTube's!

Neverblue Ads

I've signed up with another affiliate money making program: Neverblue Ads. This one is quite different from CJ and Click Bank... or Auction Ads for that matter. It seems more based on lead generation than anything else. Lots of interesting products (possible big money makers I'm thinking...) to promote. Anyway I'll certainly let you know how it goes. Stay tuned...

Auction Ads

I'm going to go ahead and give AuctionAds a try. I've been an EBay affiliate through CJ for some time but I usually don't bother with it because of the complexity of the whole thing. Auction Ads seems to make it much easier to incorporate EBay listings, plus they have this whole $25 bonus for signing up thing, pretty cool.

I'll let you know how it goes.

www.AuctionAds.com

Yahoo Search Marketing Is Too Often Overlooked

Google Google Google! That's all anyone talks about. Today I'm here to talk about Yahoo Search Marketing (The Artist Formerly Known As Overture.)

While Yahoo's PPC has some negatives going for it in comparison to Google's AdWords (less traffic, crap interface, less likely to accept ads, slow to accept ads) it also has some big positives that make it worth your time.

What are the positives? Well first of all I have found that I have higher conversion rates with Yahoo's PPC than I do with AdWords. So while the traffic may not come in as fast, the traffic I do get from Yahoo is of very high quality. And with all of the crap useless traffic you can get out there in the wild world of the internets you should jump at any chance for quality traffic that can make you sales. Another big positive is the fact that it is so often overlooked (Google Google Google.) In other words there is less competition for the top spots for your keywords.

Yahoo also offers a $25 bonus when you sign up.

PageRank Predictions & A "NoFollow" Rant

Google hasn't updated PR in so long that people have resorted to using PR prediction tools, such as THIS ONE which predicts this site will jump from the PR 1 it is now to a PR 4 (well 3.5, but it rounds up!)

There are many theories floating around as to why Google hasn't updated PageRank in a long time. One of my favorites is that Google is trying to "throw people off." Selling links has become a big market and many people sell (and buy) links based on the PR of a page. The idea is that Google is trying to nip this in the bud by just not updating PR.

While I don't really agree with this theory I do think it's possible that Google is concerned about the effects of PageRank being displayed. It seems to have actually greatly increased the whole link selling/buying phenomenon that they are so against.

It reminds me of the whole "nofollow" fiasco which I think has mostly backfired. I don't think it's really stopped (or even slowed down) spam and I think it has had an unintended consequence of many webmasters using "nofollow" when it shouldn't be used. The basic idea behind Google's algorithms is that they rank pages based on links from other pages but if they are no longer counting the links that they should be counting, is it really accurate? A great example is Wikipedia which has decided to "nofollow" EVERY link going off their site including their RESOURCE links. This is completely against the so "democratic" nature of the internet that Google is supposed to be for.

Personally I think we should start "nofollowing" links TO Wikipedia if they aren't going to follow them out! Let me start: Wikipedia.org

Affiliate Marketing Vs. AdSense

I'm always amazed by the amount of people who think that AdSense is the only way to make money online. Many of them seem to entirely dismiss affiliate marketing.

Many of these people seem scared of affiliate marketing because with affiliate marketing you generally only get paid if you refer an actual sale while with AdSense you get paid just for having your links clicked on.

While it is true that you have to refer an actual sale to get paid with affiliate marketing it's also true that while AdSense generally adds up in pennies, affiliate commissions can add up much much faster.

For example this morning I made a $155 commission from the sale of a single product. This was through the from WorldNiche affiliate program, warning: this company does sell sex enhancement products if you are not interested in that, don't click!) Do you know many clicks on AdSense it will take to make $155? A *lot* in most cases (of course this depends on the subject of your pages and which AdSense ads appear.)

You may thinking to yourself: "Yeah, but you have AdSense ads on this very site?" Yes. I'm not saying you shouldn't use AdSense or that you can't make money with it, just that it's not the end all of making money online. I make far more money with affiliate marketing than I do with AdSense (nearly 10 times as much currently.)

How do you get started with affiliate marketing? Well I wrote a cool step by step guide back in February so I'll point you to that: Step By Step Affiliate Marketing.

Which affiliate program do I make the most money with? OAInternet (also sex enhancement.) Despite the fact that they don't have the greatest affiliate interface or affiliate materials (banners and the like) they have some great things going for them. Here's four:

#1 Great Conversions. This means a lot of the clicks you send them turn into sales. This is obviously extremely important. I've wasted lots of time and money sending clicks to affiliate programs that just never seem to make any sales, so when I find one that works - I stick with it! OAInternet definitely works.

#2 Great Commissions. You make at least 50% on all sales. You can make as much as $200 on a single sale.

#3 Great Support. If you have any questions you can contact them directly on ICQ or EMail. They tend to get back to you very quickly. With some affiliate programs it can be very hard to contact anyone sometimes, that's very frustrating.

#4 They Pay Weekly. You can get paid by various means. I use EPassPorte because they don't take any fees from your deposits! Most affiliate programs pay monthly, so a weekly payment is quite cool and another great thing about OAInternet.

If you are completely new to affiliate marketing and what to get "lead by the hand" then I suggest trying "Making You Richer." This is a program aimed at beginners and they will lead your through all the steps. They will even provide a website for you to use.

Webmaster Forums

Webmaster Forums can be a great place to keep up with the latest information in SEO and internet marketing in general. Most importantly they can be a great place to make deals with other webmasters and/or get services done for you.

In my experience I've found that Digital Point is THE webmaster forum. I recommend starting off with them and for the most part sticking with them because too much forum browsing can be a huge waste of your time.

The great thing about Digital Point is their Buy, Sell, or Trade market place. I've been using this to get services (such as article writing) done for me. That's really the place I spend most of my time at and I advise the same for you! Along with buying & selling services there you can also buy & sell domains and websites (with content.)

If you get too into the chattering about various things (examples: when will Google's page rank update? Which search engines results are most relevant?) you end up just wasting your time and you have to remember that a lot of the stuff you see in forums is just plain wrong whether it be because the writer doesn't have your best intentions in mind or he's merely ill informed. So take what you read at webmaster forums like Digital Point with a grain of salt.

Free Classified Ad Postings

If you are just starting out and you have very little money to invest one thing that can work surprisingly well is free classified ad postings.

These free ads can show up in the search engine results very quickly sometimes. I do find that the conversion rates (the amount of sales made per visitor) tend to be quite a bit lower with these types of ads but for the price (free or very cheap if you choose some of the extra features) it's a great deal.

There are two in particular that I want to suggest (that I have used myself as well.)

www.USFreeAds.com - I actually suggest the premium membership for $10/month because it allows your ads to run forever automatically. That's a pretty damn good deal for only $10/month. But you can also post for free if you are absolutely broke. USFreeAds can also be a good way to get some backlinks in Yahoo & MSN too... they are "nofollow" links so they won't work as backlinks in Google.)

www.WebClassifieds.US - I recently had some huge success with this site. I put up an ad for a highly competitive product (and huge commission payout) and it was #3 on Google for it's brand name the very next day! Again it's free to post ads but you can get a lot of extra features for for small fees.

Shared Web Hosting You Can Rely On

I have used 8 shared web hosting plans so far in my internet marketing career. I've been able to get by using these cheap shared plans because I've never had a site with a really large amount of traffic (bandwidth use.) I will upgrade when I need to, but for most websites shared hosting is good enough. Oh, and did I mention they are very cheap.

Anyway of the 8 shared web hosting plans I have tried so far, 3 have stood out from the pack. I have yet to experience any down time (to my knowledge) with these three web hosts. This differs greatly from my other plans in which I have experienced regular down time (which costs me a lot of money in potential sales and ad clicks.) I have also experienced some hidden charges and poor customer service with other web hosts. You can feel confident when you sign up with one of the web hosts below that you are going to receive quality service.

Three Shared Web Hosts You Can Rely On:

HostGator.com - $6.95/month for one domain, $9.95/month for unlimited domains.

HostMonster.com - $5.95/month for unlimited domains (one domain registration included.) You can register additional domains through them for $10 per domain (with privacy included, making it cheaper than GoDaddy.com if you like to purchase privacy with your domain registration.)

BlueHost.com - $6.95/month for unlimited domains.