Earning by thinking outside the box
Read a great blog post from someone named PunditX that I found following one of my backlinks.
It was about how he made $95k in 2 months marketing a product all of us are aware of but few probably
knew it had an affiliate program - Adsense.
His post spells out just what he did and it seems perfectly reasonable to me. I can think of a dozen or more ways to market the product beyond what he did.
The ’secret’ to his success is that he did not assume “oh that must be saturated” or “that will not work”. he went out and made it work.
He even states he tested 35 different landing pages - which is probably a huge driver in his success. Not being lazy is a critical component to affiliate marketing success.
Too many in affiliate marketing assume that they have to follow the crowd or that their AM knows whats best - the entire time I was focused on affiliate marketing I never had an AM I spoke with regularly. There are some awesome deals on CJ noone has ever heard of and most of the CPA networks are in business for themselves first.
I know a guy who markets $.05 clicks to small niches that then turn into Ebay sales. I know another guy killing it in the Wal-mart affiliate program marketing just a few select products via PPC. There are a million things that are not dating or ringtones or <flavor of the month> that are both sustainable and scalable and that do not require super technical skills.
The best advice I can give anyone wanting to get into this space is to get outside the zone of the affiliate blogging ‘experts’ and start thinking for yourself. If you never read another blog post about affiliate marketing, you will probably be better off than if you read the top 50 affiliate bloggers religiously. The honest truth is that most affiliate blogs are full of junk and one hit wonders.
July 9th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
so right.
July 9th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Thanks for the link Diorex. Much appreciated. It’s really sad to see so many people getting stuck in the mindset of what the “gurus” tell them. It’s the people I meet at conferences that are the real gurus. The ones who don’t need to “brag” about it to be happy (I realize the apparent irony).
You have shared a lot yourself and yet seek nothing in return. You have been an inspiration to me the past year or so. I admire your approach.
July 10th, 2008 at 4:13 am
One of the reasons why I love CJ. They have the largest advertiser base. I’m always amused to see affiliates who have a mindset that they should only push DirectTrack and networks like Azoogle.
That only creates a limited amount of growth because the advertisers are less in numbers, and many networks have the same exact offers. CJ? Fathead.com. Apartments.com. Just a wide variety of advertisers, that, every time I login I feel like I’m in affiliate candy land: a huge number of diverse offers and endless possibilities on how to market them.
July 10th, 2008 at 4:26 am
Also, it is sad to see Google terminating a publisher who is using legitimate methods to drive traffic.
I pushed installs to Firefox a while ago using paid search on MSN (think of all the users who recently installed vista and type in “firefox” into the default IE which has MSN as the main search engine.) and was never terminated.
July 10th, 2008 at 5:47 am
productionhead, Yes, I did a little work with the FF referral too but the payout was a little too low and there was slightly less volume. As this was just one of my “test” offers (read: not on the company account or time) I had to bankroll this myself. Volume was not an issue so every second of my time was spent on this one. Totally worth it though.
Diorex: You mentioned that you would have marketed it a number of different ways. Care to share?
July 10th, 2008 at 11:30 am
They say beat it until it’s dead. Too bad it died an early death.
July 10th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
What there’s guru’s that tell me how to make money? Shoot I’ve been doing this the hard way and coming up with my own ideas all this time.
July 23rd, 2008 at 4:09 am
Yeah it’s really amazing to see how many people think the only way to do affiliate marketing is through CPA networks. Seems like “everyone” is always going for the same cookie-cutter offers from all those networks that have pretty much the same types of offers over and over.
I have found merchant networks like ShareASale much more profitable (ROI-wise), than most CPA/lead offers I’ve ran. And as Diorex mentioned, promoting physical products is generally far more sustainable in the long term.
CPA offers come and go and I consider them just temporary moneymakers.
August 10th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
Hey Diorex,
Been a longtime reader at Oooff and quite happy you’re back posting again. Anyways, sharing this was pretty sweet and I learned a bit from PunditX’s post. Anyways, I was wondering if I could get in touch with you to chat privately and swap ideas.
I’m going to run my first affiliate search PPC campaign in a while and am taking your advice to go with products that have a higher than $10 payout so I can scale, though it’s mostly for the testing prior to promoting organically. That’s why I was hoping to have a talk, n perhaps see if I can help you out too somehow :D.
If so, email me :).
Cheers
Gab