Well here I am finally making another post about making money on the internet, this time I want to go over what I think about affiliate marketing, and to give those that are clueless about affiliate marketing a better idea of what it is. For starters, my name is D.Wep and I am an affiliate marketer, I am not a blogger. Sure I have many blogs and I write posts on them, but they are all intended to do one thing in the end, and that is to make me some damn money.

So I do not blog just for the sake of blogging. Every blog that I have is very niche specific and targets a certain type of search engine traffic, and then once that blog is getting traffic I will use some sort of affiliate to make some money off of my work. Here at this blog Making Net Money I am currently using Chitika, which is similar to Adsense, it just doesn’t pay as well. That is the affiliate merchant I am using on this blog. People pay Chitika for them to publish their ads, when someone from the search engine searches for a keyword and happens to stumble upon this Making Money on the Internet Blog, keyword related ads will show up. If the searcher clicks then I get a percentage of what that advertiser had to get the ad up. I get money, the advertiser gets targeted traffic to their site and hopefully makes a sale.

If you are brand new to affiliate marketing you may have no clue to what it is that I just said, that is fine, if you are to be successful you will keep learning and eventually it will all fall into place. So if you are new to this, making money on the internet, where do you start? Well most will start using Adsense, complete newbs will use adsense, they will write 30 posts on a blog, targeting all sorts of keywords that they will never rank for, and put adsense on their blog from day 1. Then eventually they will start getting some traffic, maybe a tricke, 30-40 uniques a day, and they will be seeing nothing but 5 cent clicks, although the dollar click will come through every once in a while (I have been there).

They will put countless hours into this one adsense blog, and maybe after a couple of months go by, they will finally receive their first paycheck from adsense, because of the $100 payout minimum. If you are new to affiliate marketing, stay away from adsense until you understand it completely, and more than that understand how affiliate marketing works altogether through other programs first, such as the eBay Partner Network, CJ, Clickbank, Amazon along with many others. If you have your heart on using adsense from jumpstreet (which you shouldn’t), then I suggest you stop by some of Grizz’s Blogs and read everything he covers on adsense on all of them. Some will be successful by doing this but most will fail to be blunt with you.

Now if you are still reading this than I assume that you have a general knowledge of search engine optimization, and that content is not King as back links are everything when it comes to ranking in the search engines. So how do you find an affiliate to market? It all depends on what kind of niche it is that you are working. In my opinion, if you are not making at least $1,000 bucks a month, you should not be targeting any kind of “make money online” niche nor should you be targeting any affiliates as you should be targeting keywords and products that have less competition. This may be kind of tempting to do though as their are thousands and thousands of make money online products and affiliates that are out there, from what I have heard from Vic and Grizz is they convert horribly though. Also, if you can not make a measly $1,000 a month of affiliate marketing, you should be working other niches and building as many sites as you can until you find some winners. As long as you diversity and go through trials and errors with affiliates, you will find some winners.

Back to choosing affiliates to work with and stuff to promote so you can start making money on the internet. Depending on what it is this can be a bitch. I have a couple of blogs that are alcohol related and they have huge authority and get decent traffic, although I have not found a good affiliate to use to make money off of them. Sure there are a couple of beer making books from Click Bank, but many advertisers that use ads (adsense and chitika) do not support the promotion of alcohol, but they will pay you top dollar for dui lawyer content, not how to get drunk, pick a bar fight and wake up with a dime piece the next day, which is the kind of stuff I like to write about on those coupld of beer blogs that I got. Guess what, I barely  go to them anymore unless I am completly drunk, or one day find a way to successfully monetize a beer and liquor blog.

The best affiliate for me, so far has been the EPN Network. The Ebay Partner Network accounts for 75% of my income, I use about 15 other affiliates other than them. That tells me one thing, that I need to diversity my sites more with what kind of affiliate I use. If someone at the eBay Partner Network decides to cancel my account for some reason, I am pretty much fucked, so I have started building sites like crazy using as many affiliates as possible. Same thing with adsense, if for some reason I lose one of my accounts, how am I going to compensate with that if I am depending on adsense income every month?

One last not, the best way to go about making money on the internet is to cut out the middle man, the middle man being the affiliate merchant. The cheapest way for you to do this is to get the 7 dollar script, and then get a bunch of private lable rights eBooks and make some minnie sites. Eventually I would like the oppurtunity to create my own product, or my own eBook and promote it while also selling the private lable rights and the master resale rights. This is my ultimate goal, and to reach that goal I will have to rely on affiliate marketing for making money on the internet until then.

EDIT: Feb 2010 – Due to the new pricing system of the eBay Partner Network I no longer recommend the use of this script to making money on the internet. You can still make money by using the script but it is no where as efficient as it used to be when it comes to making money on the internet.

If you are completely new to making money on the internet, and want to know How to Make Money Online then my recommendation would be to start off with Build a Niche Store, also known as BANS. This is not the best method of making money on the internet in my opinion, but it does make me about 1,000 bucks a month, and I have not done any site building with BANS in awhile. But for the beginner, this is what I would recommend, simply because it is easy to install, it is easy to set up, and it is easy to bring in traffic.

Before you start making money on the internet with BANS you will have to sign up to be an eBay affiliate through the eBay Partner Network.

Now to be on your way making money on the internet with BANS, you will need some initial start up cash. I believe that the price of the script is $97 dollars right now at the moment. Now that you have the software you will have to set up a hosting account, one that works well for me is hostprise, which is great for the beginner as they have the cheapest reseller accounts that are around. Once you set up a hosting account, you will next need to do some keyword research.

Find a buying keyword, what I mean by buying is say that you are trying to sell golf clubs. They you would want to use something like cheap golf clubs, golf clubs for sale, discount golf clubs etc. A buying keyword is essential if you are to be making money on the internet with BANS. When you are choosing a keyword, think about if that keyword has a buying need or not, if someone is just searching for “golf clubs”, then they may be looking for information about the types of golf clubs, or how to use a golf club, not necessarily wanting to buy a golf club. Pick something with low competition. If you have been reading my posts then you should have SEO quake installed, see what site sits at number one for keyword that you are trying to take over.

Choose a domain name and register it, I use go daddy for domain names, but I use either hostprise or hostgator for hosting. If you can find a pre-owned domain name, that has one or more of your keywords in it, then go for it. My personal preference is I only use .com’s and .net’s, I have done no tests with any other kinds of domains other than those, they have worked for me so I am sticking with that.

If you cant find a pre-owned domain name, then register a new one, there is almost always a way to get a .com and fit all of your keywords in the domain name (unless you are tackling a popular niche, which you shouldn’t be doing as a newb). I have found that having the exact keywords in the url is the best onsite seo that you can possibly do, although not necessary to rank number one, just helps a hell of a lot, and has helped me in making money on the internet with BANS.

If you need help installing the script then the BANS forums has plenty of useful tutorials on how to get your niche store running, I wouldn’t take their information on SEO to heart though. If you want to be making money on the internet with BANS, you will go broke following the SEO tactics there, they are helpful for the installation and technical issues though.

There is a problem with BANS though and if you just throw up a spammy store, then you will more than likely get de-indexed. You can either learn this the hard way or you can follow some of my tips that I have used, and more than 75% of my stores are still indexed and they are ranking strong.

Keep the store ten pages or less, this will help your site not look like a duplicate content spam site. Think about it, you put in a category id in the set up, the category is golfing, and boom, you have over a 1,000 pages all filled with eBay items. The problem is, many people do this, and in theory, triggers a major flag that your site is spam. What I do is I put about a paragraph above the product listings, and as much as possible beneath the listings, especially on the home page. I do the same for all of my store pages, which is always less than 10. You should only be targeting a couple of keywords anyway, so there are really no need for multiple pages. My best performing BANS store has 5 pages, it gets about 300 uniques a day, and makes me 40% of my entire income.

Change the name of the store pages, change the name of the sidebar tags, such as “Home” and “store pages” to something that is relevant to your keyword. Remove the sponsored links H2 tag, just another dumb foot print you do not need. Remove the powered by footer. This will remove some footprints, not so much from search engines, but by idiots that try and see who is competing with them, who is working the same BANS product they are.

Don’t worry about making the theme look pretty, in fact, for the newbie, just erase the header and do not worry about an image. Most of the sites that make me money have no header image, just an H1 tag with the keyword that I am targeting. You need to be spending time getting links instead of making your site look pretty. Once you are done with the site, build a bunch more. Do not put all of your eggs in this script BANS though, there are many ways that you can be making money on the internet, use as many as you can.