It has been almost a year since I made my last post and for good reason. First, life has been busy, but second, I have not been happy with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is TOO MUCH work. I know, I know, you have to work hard for your money right? But not all of us can afford to sit in front of the computer all day monitoring internet traffic, PPC campaigns, tweaking, tuning, optimizing click through rates, chasing after the hottest affiliate campaigns, tracking, and trending all this information. If you want to get serious at affiliate marketing, you must make it a full time job. The one time where I let my campaigns run a few days mostly unattended, I have lost nearly $600 on weak campaigns. But what can I do? I had no time to check my campaigns because I also have a full-time job. So my search began for a new strategy to make money…

I don’t actually need to make hundreds of thousands of dollars online. My full-time job pays me well, very well in-fact that I don’t need money from online marketing. But, I love making money and it doesn’t hurt to supplement your income to afford other unnecessary toys. So after months of research and talking with friends and co-workers, I have decided to build an online business that requires very little effort and cash so that I can keep my full-time job and have time to enjoy life and family. An additional income of $500 per month is more than satisfactory for my needs. How many of my readers are in the same boat? I am sure there are many.

My new strategy for making money is returning to the old-fashioned content and revenue through Adsense. I like Google’s Adsense revenue stream because it is significantly less effort than a PPC campaign. But that also means equally less revenue comparably. Let me get this straight: I will not build a website, fill it with content, and then sit back and rake in the Adsense revenue. Instead, my website will be built with “just enough” content and “just enough” polish to start bringing in NO MORE than $10 per month and good amount of visitors. Once I have reached this pinnacle goal, I will flip this website. Say wha? Like I said, I don’t want nor do I have the time to put a lot of work into websites. My personality prefers to work on projects in the short term and then quickly move onto something else. So once I’ve built a site that is PROVEN to generate revenue, the website will have enough merit and potential for somebody more dedicated to take it to the next level. I will sell the website for 8x to 10x its monthly revenue and move onto my next project.

For an example to use in this blog for my readers, I registered EpicFailHumor.com to compete with the other top-notch fail blog websites. Fail blogs are in a very competitive niche, but I want to show you that I am not here to compete with the big boys. I just want to make $10 so that it can be sold to somebody else who is more capable of marketing it into something that will be a strong contender and a big revenue generator. This website was designed simple with a plain theme, but fully equipped with SEO and Adsense. The potential buyer will see that the website has room for improvement, the content is strong, there is interest on the site by visitor count (i.e., Google Analytics will be installed), and the topic is familiar to him/her. These are all things that makes the website sellable.

So, let the journey begin. Please follow my website development and look at what I’ve done. Most of the work is behind the scenes, which is what you really want. I will periodically post my visit count and Adsense revenue. I will also post the price that this website sold for. If anybody is interested in buying this website, it is for sale.

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.