Random Thoughts

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to myRSS feed. Thanks for visiting and stop by often!

Sitting on a beach getting a great tan, with a drink in hand I decide I better go home and get some work done.  I jump into my Black Lamborghini Murcielago and head on home to my $2.5 million dollar gated home.  I login to my computer for 1 hour each day and watch the profits roll in….all $5000 per day!

Isn’t it ridiculous what some of these Internet marketers will tell you!  The problem is, somehow many people actually believe them.

When I started in Affiliate Marketing I found so many of these claims that if you buy their e-book, you will be making thousands by tomorrow.  Just type “make money online” into a search engine and look at the claims made by the sponsored ads on the right.  The truth of the matter is this; Many of these affiliate marketers make money by selling you products that tell you how to make money, yet they themselves don’t actually make a dime, unless you buy the book! Photoshop is a handy tool, isn’t it!  It can help put a face in a sports car, or in front of a large home that they claim they bought with all their internet earnings.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of money to be made in affiliate marketing or internet marketing, but it won’t be quite as easy as many claim.

Affiliate marketing is an interesting business that certainly keeps me on my toes, much more than any “real job” has.  With a conventional job, you go into work everyday and you trade your time for some money.  While you’re there, you do what they tell you to do, within a set of guidelines and expectations and then you head home for the evening and do it all over again.  This kind of arrangement is just not for me.

I have a very entrepreneurial mindset in that I would rather make $30k working for myself than $100k working for someone else.  Sure, a steady paycheck might be nice but what do you sell in exchange for the money your employer gives you?  Time with family, friends, helping others…those are much more important than anything else, even driving a nice car or living in a nice home and certainly not worth the trade-off in my opinion.

So What Is The Affiliate Marketing Life Really Like?

Many 12 hour days of sitting in front of the computer where some days, if I calculated my time vs earnings,  I work for $1 per hour…whereas other days, I will earn much more.  Here’s how I spend most days:  I get up early only because I like to, not because I must.  I work  a few hours at Starbucks on my laptop before coming home.  I work for several hours at home then take a break and watch a little TV.  Then it’s supper and then I’ll work on my laptop and watch TV with my wife or occasionally we go out.  It’s not a glamorous life, but I like it.

Am I rich?  NO WAY!  Do I have the potential to earn quite a bit?  YES, but it will take a lot of time, commitment and perseverance.  No one is cracking the whip everyday and making me work.  If I don’t work, I don’t make any money - it’s as simple as that.

Don’t get sucked into ridiculous income claims.  If you desire to make money online, just work hard, keep your head up even when things are not going well and eventually your hard work will pay off.  You will need to be a constant student;  Learn new information or techniques and come up with new ideas that will help your business every single day.  People that make money online are explorers, innovators and are driven to learn and succeed.

Those that are looking for a manual that will tell you exactly what to do to make money online…I suggest you keep your day job!

Initially when I bought BANS, I was under the impression that I could just throw up 50 stores and in no time I would be making some serious coin.  Nothing could be further from the truth at all.  Not that BANS is a bad product, but I’m just an idiot sometimes!

My BANS progression has been slow and steady and my ideas have evolved over the past 6 months.  At first I was building nice BANS stores, but very thin.

Next step was to add some content pages.  Then content on store pages.

After that I was still making under $300 per month from 22 stores, which was pretty sad.  The next logical step was to add a blog in a directory called ../blog.  This is when sales really started taking off.

Things were going along well, and then comes the EPN expirations which made me re-evaluate my sites.  I looked at the ones with low EPC, or the ones that were in niches that I thought would be good,  but turned out to be terrible.  I shut those stores down and was down to 14 quality stores.

Then came the WP/BANS integration talk and I jumped in.  Since I had BANS on the root directory and the blog in a blog directory, I could not use many of the templates that require Wordpress to be installed on the root.  Soon enough my issue was solved when Soggy, from the BANS forum started offering BANS/WP integrated templates for those that have BANS in the root directory.  For a small investment I now have 14 very nice, quality sites that I am adding content to quite often through the blog.

The result; Clicks are down, sales stayed about the same for now and EPC went up quite a bit.  Traffic is growing slowly.  Now the people that stick around on my sites appear to be less likely to click unless they’re serious about buying.  I suspect this is part of what eBay has been looking for when they talk about “engaged” users, but really…no one knows what they really want!

Really, for me it doesn’t not matter anymore what Ebay thinks.  As per yesterdays post,  I have been terminated by EPN, so I will continue on with my sites, without eBay.

I highly recommend buying templates from Soggy and you can get his WP/BANS templates here.

Well, my day has arrived - I’ve been terminated by the Ebay Partner Network.  Well, I can’t say that I’m happy about this decision, but I’m not devastated either.  EPN is the WORST affiliate program in existence!  I hated the uncertainty of not knowing if or when I was going to get this email and I’m glad it came sooner than later.  I truly believe that Ebay is on its way out as their business is down and they screwed their sellers recently as well.  I’m glad this happened while my earnings were relatively low, rather than waiting until my whole existence depended on them.

So now you might be wondering what I’m going to do.  I’m going to keep the 14 BANS/WP integrated sites that I have and start building a business with CJ, Pepperjam and Shareasale using PopShops.  At least I should be able to build a more stable and secure business since Ebay was highly unreliable.

My advice to anyone that is considering purchasing BANS - Go for it, but integrate it with Wordpress and DON’T build a business with Ebay.  Build it with PopShops and merchants that are actually greatful for your business.

So far in my niche website building life, the search engines have not been kind. I get a trickle from Google, a little bit more from MSN and until recently, Yahoo was not in the picture at all. Now the tables have turned. Yahoo has finally started sending decent numbers of traffic to a few of my websites and I’m ranking #1 for a phrase that gets quite a few searches. Now if only I could be number one for that same phrase with Google - I’d be rich!

Even with the SE’s being less than kind, I have still managed to do pretty well in terms of sales. Over the summer months MSN was bringing in a bulk of the traffic and it helped me to increase 90% month over month, with no cost.

So you might be wondering what it is that I did to get Yahoo to come around and the answer make surprise you. I did nothing! Well, not exactly nothing. I’ve been building my sites for about 6 months now and Yahoo seems to have “flipped a switch” and turned the traffic on. It just showed up one day recently.

I know people constantly harp about Google killing BANS sites and other thin affiliate sites and this may give reason to panic if you earn your income from thin sites. For those that build quality websites with plenty of content, custom design and a good niche, no need to worry. Best case scenario; Google won’t touch your site. Worst case scenario; you get de-listed by G…BUT, there are other search engines out there. As long as your niche isn’t so obscure that it only receives 20 searches per month, then you will be fine with MSN and Yahoo traffic as it provides decent search volumes for many niches.

You know the old phrase “Don’t sweat the details” - Forget that you ever learned that when building your BANS store.  You need to be a detail person and make sure that your website is finished properly.   

First clue to me that a BANS store is not finished is when I see “Your Link Here” or something like that.  These are frequently included in templates that you can download and they’re designed for exactly what they say they are…PUT YOUR LINK THERE!  Find the header file and replace the phrase with something like “Info About Widgets” and make sure your link works.

Another clue that a BANS store is not completed are the words “Store Navigation” or “Site Navigation”.  Every BANS store has these and it’s easy to change them.  These are also terms that are in the header.php file that you can change and it will help with your search engine rankings.  Just go into your BANS control panel, into the template file and search for the words “Store Navigation” and put “Widgets For Sale” or something related to your website in it’s place. 

Build your own store pages – Don’t import the categories from eBay.  Make targeted store pages and use unique meta information on EVERY page. 

Last clue that a site has not been finished is in the general design.  I tend to want to change as much as I can for two reasons.  I don’t want my site to look anything like an out of the box BANS store and I don’t want the search engines to de-list my store as a crappy thin affiliate site.  Go to the CSS file and experiment with changing the colors of the text, backgrounds, borders etc.  Don’t be afraid to use #ffffff, which is white;  People like white space.  If you’re really bad with design, buy a nice looking template.  Search the BANS forum for people making templates or offering design work.

When it comes to marketing, I’m somewhat lucky with building my BANS stores because I do have a bit of background in marketing.  I understand that not everyone has had this experience so it may take a bit of learning to get the hang of the marketing concept.

When you go about building your BANS store, start thinking like you are the customer.  What would you want to see when you land on a website?  What about colors an the overall “feel” of the website?  Does your BANS store have an attractive layout and color scheme?  This may be somewhat subjective, but your bounce rate can help you out when analyzing this.  If you’re bounce rate is 100%, then people get to your website and leave right away.  IF they clicked on an eBay listing, this is great, but if they just hit their back button, that’s not what you want.  Experiment a bit with the design to get your bounce rate to an acceptable level.  For me, my successful stores have a bounce rate of less than 45%, but this could be different for many people.

One thing I have noticed with a lot of BANS stores is that the builders just aren’t thinking in terms of target market.  Who are your customers and what do they want to buy?  For example, if you have a website selling womens shoes, it’s unlikely that a banner promoting software will be all that effective.  A better fit might be a banner promoting makeup or jewelry.

Now for me, I tend not to use banners on my websites as I’ve found that they just don’t convert.  I would rather have someone click on an eBay listing and have a cookie dropped than lose a click to another merchant, but that’s just me.  It might work for you.