WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

Can you really get rich with affiliates?? What’s the average monthly cost of Google AdWords? What’s the average income with Google Adwords? Does Affiliate Marketing really work? How long does it take to make money?

These are all excellent questions that I’m still grappling with. I’ve been tinkering with Affiliate Marketing and Search Marketing for the last 5 months and here are six things that I’ve learned so far…

Lesson 1. Affiliate Marketing and Search Marketing are not get-rich-quick schemes.

Apparently, the average life span of an affiliate marketer is one month. People discover it, try it, burn out and quit within a month. There are success stories (like Affiliate Millions), but in reality, it’s harder than it looks. Search Marketing is appealing because it’s such a simple concept and in-theory, once it’s running, takes little maintenance from you:

6 Steps to Making Money with Affiliate Marketing (Search Marketing)

1. Sign up for an affiliate program (with a network like Commission Junction.)
2. Place ads for your affiliate program on a Sponsored Search Engine search like Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing.
3. Monitor your commissions using the reporting features of Commission Junction.
4. Tweak your advertising campaign to make sure your commissions exceed your advertising costs.
5. Once you have a campaign that is making you money, scale the campaign up by increasing your maximum advertising budget.
6. Create other campaigns so you have multiple sources of online income

Lesson 2. The Majority Of Your Customers Will Buy (or not Buy) The Day They Click On Your Ad

Even though many affiliate programs allow 90 or 120 day cookie durations, the vast majority of people will either buy or not buy your product when they first click on the link. I used to wait, hoping that more commissions would later roll in, but it rarely happens. It’s like sitting by the phone and waiting for a date to call. Besides, with browsers like Firefox making it easy to clear the private data (including cookies) with the click of a button, I wonder how many of my affiliate cookies are getting brushed away before the 90 or 120 day mark, anyways.

Lesson 3. Picking a Good Affiliate Program is Critical.

Picking a good affiliate program is critical. I’m still working on this one. I really liked one telecommunication product. Unfortunately, commissions were only awarded on online sales through their website. (Any sales made through their software program did not earn a commission.) This means that the chances of you earning a recurring commission were slim because once they’ve installed the program, chances are they’ll top up their account through the program, not the website. So now I look for programs that offer high commission rates, long referral periods (even though people may be deleting the cookies), deep linking so that I can send visitors directly to relevant sites, as well as a program that is part of Commission Junction. (Yes, I realize there are other networks out there, but by focusing on one affiliate network, it makes it easier to earn the minimum amount required for a check or direct deposit.

Lesson 4. Earning Per Click Data from Commission Junction is Useful, but Misleading

Commission Junction provides data on the Earnings Per (hundred) Click (EPC) for the ads that they offer. So an ad that has an EPC of $23.45 means the earnings are $0.23 per click. In theory, as an affiliate marketer, this is important news because if you can purchase ads for less than $0.22 per click, you’ll be making money. Sure, the profit margin might be only a few cents per click, but once you have a successful campaign, all you have to do is scale up your budget to get thousands of clicks.

But the data is misleading because you only know the earning side of the puzzle. You don’t know the cost side, so it’s impossible to figure out the Return Per Click. In other words, the problem with the Commission Junction EPC data is that you don’t know how much was spent to earn the commission. So the EPC might be $23.45 (or $0.23 per click), but the campaign might be an unprofitable campaign because it cost the advertiser $0.30 per click on Google AdWords. Still, it’s an interesting piece of information and it gives you somewhere to start.

Lesson 5. Pick an Affiliate Program that Has a High Volume of Sales

Commission Junction ranks the Network Earnings of all of their programs on a scale from 1 to 5. (Five being a product with high volumes of commissions passing through.) More important than the Earnings Per Click is the Network Earning score. A five star rating on Network Earnings means the pie is bigger -the company is pulling in more sales through Commission Junction - which usually means it’ll be easier to slice off a piece of the action for yourself.

Lesson 6. Using Dynamic Keywords In Your Title will Improve Your Click Through Rates.

It’s important to tweak your ads to improve their click through rates (CTR). I’ve found the best way to increase your CTR is by using the dynamic keyword insertion feature in the title. This way, the keywords that triggered your ad will appear in bold in your ad, making your ad stand out. There are four different ways to do this, and depending on how you capitalize keyword, will affect the capitalization of your dynamic ad.

• all lowercase
  {keyword: An Alternate Title to Appear if Your Keyword is Too Large}
• First letter capitalized
  {Keyword: An Alternate Title to Appear if Your Keyword is Too Large}
• Every Word Capitalized
  {KeyWord: An Alternate Title to Appear if Your Keyword is Too Large}
• EVERY LETTER CAPITALIZED
  {KEYWORD: An Alternate Title to Appear if Your Keyword is Too Large}

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