About 3 months, I came to the conclusion that I needed a little bit more cash to supplement my income. I am currently a father of 2 and my wife is a stay-at-home mother. I started surfing the web for "make money online" types of keywords and came across a few things:
1) Plenty of bogus offers guaranteeing me millions within a month
2) Affiliating Marketing offering that I will be making $500 per day almost immediately
3) Paid Surveys that are calculating: If I do 5 surveys per day at $20 each, I will make $100/day!
After reading plenty about it (through forums and articles), I chose to try affiliate marketing. At first, I went after it with the instruction of these forums and articles: I signed up for an affiliate website (Commission Junction), set myself up a GoogleAds account and went for it!...
...And lost my shirt! I spent about $200 in about 1 week on advertising and got ZERO sales. My first realization was that I really did not have a clue on what I was doing. One thing that I continued to see on many of the forums was PERSEVERANCE! My story is not a new one and the right mentality and focus are the key! At this point, I chose to get a bit of formal help through an eBook. (I chose the Life Empowered System because I like how it focused on your mental frame of mind, the technical aspects of setting up affiliate marketing campaigns, and the online email support) This helped, a lot! I solved many of my initial problems from reading the eBook alone. BUT!, it takes more than an eBook to make this work!
At this point, I dropped all of my campaigns and started again from scratch. I followed the eBook fairly closely and... ...not a single sale! Again PERSEVERANCE is the key! I continued to research what I was doing wrong and revisited the eBook many times. For every single failure so far, I know an exact reason why it did not work! Affiliate marketing IS A SKILL and it requires study and understanding to make it work! Below are some of my biggest mistakes I had made:
1) Finding AND researching your product!
The product you choose may be the MOST IMPORTANT part about this venture! Understanding your product and its market is the second most important!
2) Understanding HOW to promote your product!
The psychology behind ad-copy is quite interesting, fun and a requirement! Learning how to write an ad that people notice that makes you stand above and beyond the rest is not trivial. It requires thought and research!
3) Understanding WHERE to promote your product!
At first, I bombed with GoogleAds (for a lot of reasons, and none of them are GoogleAds fault!). Then, I even more stupidly started to SPAM people. That just made people hate me. Placing your ads in cost-effective, targeted locations is critical! If you are trying to sell acne medication and you are promoting it on American Idol websites, you will get plenty of costly clickers, but no buyers.
These are things that you learn from experience, read in online forums and articles, and explained in great depth in some of the available eBooks. If you are planning to get into this internet marketing game, be prepared for an initial upward battle, but once you reach the top, things become easier and money will ultimately start to flow! Remember PERSEVERANCE and education (on both affiliate marketing and the products you are promoting) are the keys to a successful and prosperous online money making program.
Matt is a 31 year entrepreneur from San Diego, CA. View my diary of affiliate internet blogging at: http://Affiliate-Diary.TheWebReviewer.com
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