I am now creating my website for the offer. There is a bit of work to do here:

1. I am designing my landing page (800×600 resolution) in Inkscape first. Graphic design was one of my many prior skills.
2. I stubbed out my landing page and the css (cascading style sheet) I will be using. When I get my landing page designed, I will slice the graphics in.
3. I created a contacts page in PHP. It is waiting to be linked into the landing page.

These are the remaining things on my plate for this weekend.

1. Create a generic Privacy Policy to use for all my offers. Might have to steal the terms and conditions from the offer page. We shall see what that looks like.
2. Create a generic Terms and Conditions page template. I will steal the terms and conditions from the offer.
3. Create a generic About page for what my company does.
4. Create a PHP redirect page that will accept an offer ID and call up the appropriate page for me. This will allow me to do proper split testing of my landing pages.
5. Write the code to add a Last Updated date on my main page.
6. Upload all the pages to my host.

These are the last few steps I can think of before designing keywords and launching my campaigns on Facebook. Oh yeah, I also took a bit of time to write up the caption and description of my ad for Facebook. I was testing some keywords and limited my demographic to women ages 18-30 giving me approximately 268,000 possible hits on Facebook. I am really stretching my marketing skills here and will really need to think outside the sandbox for future offers if I want to be successful at affiliate marketing. I also searched for some images for my ad and saved it on my computer.

Today I registered for two domains. One is going to be used for my affiliate marketing, and the other I snapped up because it was a nice .com domain name that was available (unrelated to affiliate marketing).  If you are new to creating a .com website, here’s how you do it.

1. I went to Register.com to search if my domain name was available first.
2. When I found one, I went to 1&1 to register the domain for myself ($8.99/year).
3. Later, I open up a Linux hosting account with Hostgator.com ($7.95/month).
4. After 24-hours when everything is setup, forward the domain name from 1&1 to Hostgator. Edit the domain settings in 1&1’s control panel and point it to Hostgator’s DNS server (which should have been provided to you in an e-mail during registration).

Some notes about what I mentioned above. I chose 1&1 for my domain registration because they are one of the cheapest for this. I also chose Hostgator because they offer Linux packages with unlimited domains, unlimited disk space, and (most importantly) unlimited databases. If you are going to create many websites, you will want all these features.

Finally, I chose a single domain to serve all my affiliate marketing campaigns. I picked a very generic domain name like affiliatemedia.com so that I can create any campaign on that URL without it feeling out of place. If you are planning on using SEO, then ensure that your domain name contains some of the keywords.

Tomorrow, I will touch on how I’m going to put my web page files there.

My Pick

For my first campaign, I am using Facebook to advertise. Facebook has advantages over Google, Yahoo, and MSN for a person starting out in affiliate marketing.

1. Facebook uses demographic targeting alllowing me to restrict my scope of advertising to a smaller subset of audiences. This is especially useful when trying to test the offer and the ads. Once the sandbox proves to be profitable, then it can be expanded to a greater audience and should (in theory) scale the profits just as equally.
2. New Facebook advertisers are given free money to evaluate before committing your own money. So if I was going to lose money with a weak ad campaign, I would rather lose somebody else’s money than my own.
3. Facebook has been receiving a bit of a bad reputation lately for unprecedented ad rejections. There is a group of individuals that review ads that are placed on Facebook and even if the ads fall perfectly within the guidelines, they may be rejected without reason. This has caused many advertisers to leave Facebook, but that also means a lower saturation of advertisers. This is an ideal test bed for me.

So during the course of this week, I will be evaluating the ideal demographic for my offering and designate a few keywords to target for my ads. I will also try to keep the potential traffic to a minimum to see what the CTR looks like and the conversion rate. I can spend a lot less money this way before exhausting $1000 on a full-blown ad campaign with Facebook.

As you can see, I am quite scattered in how I want to make money online. But today, I received a phone call from my Neverblue’s affiliate marketing manager. We got past our introductions quickly and began talking immediately about my business and my options. I told ‘her’ that I do no want anything over saturated, but want something that has seen some decent conversions for a person just entering the CPA arena. My goal is to promote websites through PPC advertising either on web search engines or social networking sites.

She understood what I wanted and said she will send me follow-up e-mail within the day with some offerings that I should try. When I finally got the e-mail, she provided me with 4 of what she thought were good performers. These were the offerings that were recommended:

• Game On (US) – This is an online mobile gaming offer with a payout of $6.00/sale.
• FreeCollegeScholarships.net – Offers free scholarships and payout is $4.00/lead.
• Majesty Cruiselines: Bahama Cruise Vacation – $1.40/lead.
• Over40Matching.com – Obviously an over 40 dating site with a $3.00/lead.

First thing to note is that all of these offers are for US residents only. Being Canadian, I cannot market to the audience I am most comfortable with. But I am up for a challenge. I would also not promote the Majesty Cruiselines offer because of its lower lead payout. Not that I am being greedy, but if I am spending $0.35/click on PPC advertising, I will quickly earn less than my advertising expenses.

I am not interested in the dating site because it is quite saturated already. Facebook would be a great place to use PPC advertising because I can use demographic targeting. I believe Facebook frowns upon dating advertising though. I have to do more research before ruling this one out too.

Today, I will be researching Game On (US) and FreeCollegeScholarships.net and post up some details on how I am going to promote it, my keywords, and my target demographic.

Here is a different spin on affiliate marketing. Instead of trying to find an offer from an affiliate network, you can create your own affiliate program with your local businesses by negotiating a cut for leads and sales to the business.

ShoeMoney explains how to Make Money Online with Local Affiliate Programs and is a worthy read. Check it out.

What does this have to do with affiliate marketing? Nothing!

I have fallen into the trap of doing too much reading and not taking enough action in affiliate marketing. Yesterday, I spent 5 hours reading everything I can on local small-business advertising and the concept seems to have some merit. The business model works as follow:

1. Find a small business niche and setup a web directory to list businesses in that niche. Let’s take “home inspectors” as a niche.
2. Use SEO (search engine optimization) techniques to promote the heck of that web directory to get on the first page of Google’s search engine results page.
3. You want to have a page 1 landing for your local keywords such as, “seattle home inspectors”.
   • Perform cold calling or face-to-face selling with small business owners to advertise their business on this niche directory and get a web presence.
   • Demonstrate to the business owners how your directory is better than the non-local ones like yellowpages.com or superpages.
4. Offer a 1 year-lease on that website for $800-1000.

Rinse, repeat, and make money.

I spent some time thinking about this model and whether I wanted to pursue it. Like I said, there is merit in the concept and I can definitely see the potential. But my goal is affiliate marketing and this deviates from that goal. Maybe somebody will give this a shot and let me know how it works for you.

I have dedicated myself to read almost all posts of the top 5 affiliate marketing blogs. Why am I reading instead of making money marketing? I am not the kind of person to just jump right into things. I need a plan of attack and this whole week, I have been building this plan of attack and looking at various strategies. I need a strategy that fits my lifestyle and utilizes my best strength. I will publish my plan later and hope to look back at this plan one day and see what I did right and what I did very wrong.

Back on topic … I stumbled upon another great post about step-by-step affiliate marketing posted on The Affiliate Toolbox. This one talks about promoting ringtones, which from what I learned is a heavily saturated sector. If you are interested, please have a read. You will notice that the strategies mentioned in the affiliate marketing tutorial I posted yesterday is also being applied here.

This is a must-read for beginners entering the world of affiliate marketing. After 3 days of reading and reading and even more reading all the popular affiliate marketing blogs and the WickedFire forum, I finally stumbled upon Uber Camp’s Affiliate Marketing Tutorial. This tutorial is amazing and walks a beginner through the whole process of getting into affiliate marketing. It took me nearly 4 hours to read through the tutorial in one sitting, but I feel more educated in the area of affiliate marketing and PPC advertising for the following reasons:

• All the acronyms and definitions used throughout the topic are clearly explained.
• The author goes into excruciating detail about each step of the process from picking an affiliate network to getting your first payout.
• The author has also graciously unveiled the tips and dirty tricks that one would get only from experience and trial-and-error.

Many thanks to Uber Camp for this tutorial, a very valuable resource for anybody wanting to break into affiliate marketing.

Just spent the last 2.5 hours browsing through the WickedFire affiliate marketing forum looking for a hint on where I should start.

Here’s what I learned:

1. I have to pick a campaign from Neverblue of my choosing.
2. Setup a website to up-sell the campaign/product/service. This website is usually called a landing page.
3. Ensure that the landing page looks legitimate.
4. Setup an ad promoting my website’s product through Google (Adwords). 7search, or Yahoo (YPN).
5. Watch the cash roll in.

Hmm, this seems too simple? There is definitely a catch to this, but I am not sure what that is yet. Man, I am in dire need of an “Affiliate Marketing for Dummies” book that will take me through the process step by step and show me how to make that first dollar. Something seems missing before step 4 above.

Goals for tomorrow:

1. Buy a domain name to use as landing page. I am going to pick something generic like http://mybizness.com so that it is agnostic.
2. Setup a path for my campaigns. I will use sub-paths instead of subdomains because it looks better?.
3. Leave the rest for tomorrow (steps 2-5 above). The next step will probably require some website programming knowledge. Time to brush up on those skills.

Got a phone call this evening from Neverblue. Yes, it was an interview.

They asked me about my business, other affiliate networks I belong to, my marketing techniques, what I plan on marketing, and my website url for review. They were happy with my explanation and said that that I would receive an e-mail within 15-minutes if I was accepted. 1-minute later, I got an e-mail that went straight to my Gmail spam inbox. I will have to fix this soon.

I logged in right away to see how Neverblue compares to my other affiliates: Commission Junction (CJ) and Amazon. First thing I noticed is that there are less than 1000 campaigns available. CJ and Amazon has thousands upon thousands of products and services to chose from. Campaigns were broken into topic categories such as automotive, technology, dating, etc. It took me less than an hour to review all the campaigns and their payouts.

Umm … now what? I do not know where to start. I am confused as to which campaign to pick, how to research them, and what to do next. Help!!!