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As someone who appreciates when a friend or even a stranger throws me a bone, I like to do the same for others when I can. I know many bloggers like myself struggle to earn enough income from their blogs just to pay their hosting bills, let alone actually get something in return for the hard work they put into their sites. If I had the money, I would donate regularly to every blog I read. But since I can't do that, the least I can do is try to make sure that a portion of the money I have to spend anyway ends up in a fellow web site owner's pocket. So whenever I am making a purchase online at a merchant that has an affiliate program, I try to find someone who is an affiliate to whom I can credit my purchase. Well, this has proven to be a lot harder than it sounds. I don't know if bloggers and other webmasters are just really bad at publicizing their affiliate links, or if it's a matter of search engines unfairly burying them, but it's next to impossible to find an affiliate of a given merchant by searching for one. If you're an affiliate, put the word "affiliate" somewhere on the pages that contain your affiliate links. It's not going to turn people off; if anything it will attract more people like me who want to give you a commission.
Anyway, today I'm inviting you to spam me with your affiliate links. Well okay, it's not really spamming since I asked for it, is it? Use my e-mail form to send me as many of your affiliate links as you want, and I will add them to my affiliate mall not only for my own future reference, but to help others find you, too. Be sure to tell me the name of the store, and give a link to a page on your site that contains your affiliate creative (not a direct link to the merchant). The only requirement is that your web site is free for visitors to use/read (since if you charge for access, you're already being paid for your efforts). I would also hope that you would use my mall (either my own links, or someone else's) to do your own shopping, but since there's no way for me to enforce that I'll just have to trust you to do the right thing.
So bring it on, and let's hope this helps us all earn a little bit more!
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This sponsored post has been removed due to the advertiser's refusal to uphold its end of the sponsorship agreement. Should the advertiser decide to pay what is owed to me, the post will be restored.
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A couple of slight tweaks to the site today as I move further away from the focus on making a profit online. I have left Entrecard and removed the widget from the sidebar. In its place I have listed a couple of ways you can help confoozled.com pay its own bills, along with a link to a page which describes more options in that department. I got rid of the cheesy banner near the top of the sidebar which used to link to said page, because I think most people's brains are trained to dismiss such images as ads, thus you don't even see them.
You might notice that the confoozled.com arcade has been removed from the list of ways you can help the site earn money. This is because it was becoming a nightmare to maintain and keep all of those games from eating up all of my server space, as well as the fact that in the time it's been online, it has earned me all of three cents. I have to earn $100 to be paid, and it's just not going to happen. The arcade is still online right now, but I will eventually take it down. I might replace it with a simpler version, so if you play the current arcade and have any favorite games you'd like me to keep around, be sure to let me know.
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So here's the deal. I've been neglecting confoozled.com a bit lately, and I'm going to start writing more often again. But, I'm no longer going to make it such a high priority to post every single weekday. One year after starting it, I've decided to end my experiment in making money online. There are a few reasons for this, which I may or may not go into in a later post, but suffice it to say that combined with my regular job it was too much work and added too much stress to my life. Now, I'm not going to stop earning money online completely. I'll still write sponsored posts from time to time and participate in other activities to earn some extra spending cash. I'll keep my affiliate accounts open, at least those that will still have me after the passing of a new anti-affiliate Rhode Island law. But I will no longer aggressively pursue new sources of online income, nor will I attempt to pull in more and more new blog readers solely for the purpose of increasing ad revenue - which is why I won't post fluff every single day to keep confoozled.com on all of the recently-updated blog listings. I'll only post when I actually have something to say or share, which I'm sure will still be plenty to keep you, my loyal few readers, entertained.
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My online earnings for the month of April totaled a whopping $182.70. With the exception of November, when I received payment for my first web design project, this is the highest total since I started my money making mission back in July of last year. Of course, it's nothing I could live on, but I think it's at least a good sign regarding the economy, that I was able to make more this past month than any month before. Advertisers are finally putting out higher offers for sponsored blog posts, and adding a Google ad unit to the top of the sidebar seems to have made a fairly big difference in click-through rates.
The majority of April's money came from free gift card offers, which I'm going to explain in a minute. But even taking those out of the equation, there was still an increase in earnings in every category from the previous month, and the total excluding the gift cards was still my highest, excepting November.
Now, about those gift card offers. This is something I was hesitant to do at first, but I decided to take some precautions and give it a try, and I'm so glad I did. There were five offers, all the same basic concept. You sign up for a 30-day trial membership on a web site, usually for $1 (but one of them was free). As a thank you gift for signing up, they send you a gift card to a popular merchant, usually worth $10-$30. You cancel the trial before the thirty days is up, and you're $9-$30 richer. Of course, if you do find one of the memberships useful and worth the monthly membership fee, you could always keep it. Like I said, I did five of these offers, one of them free, and for $4 out of pocket I received $100 in gift cards. I'm going to give you the links to the five offers I completed, but first there are a few things you should know.
All of these offers require a credit card number. If you don't trust the companies with your real credit card number, or if you want some extra insurance against being charged if your cancellation doesn't go through, I recommend using a virtual credit card number. Many credit card companies offer virtual card numbers as a benefit of your account, but you can also generate them through PayPal - you only need to install PayPal's browser plugin. PayPal's virtual cards are, by default, "single use cards", but that term is a bit misleading. A single use card can be charged up to four times by the same merchant within a two month period. So, after you've paid your $1 trial fee, to make sure you don't get charged any more money you'll want to go to your PayPal account and close those virtual cards. Once you have closed them they cannot be charged again.
Some companies' idea of thirty days is a little bit fishy. They may consider day one to start at midnight the day you sign up, and charge your first monthly fee at midnight on day thirty. So don't wait a whole thirty days to cancel. You can cancel as soon as you receive your gift card (which took about two weeks for me), but I waited until the three week mark.
All of these require a phone call to their toll free number to cancel your trial. I had a big problem with this at first. I figured, if a company can start taking my money without speaking directly to me, then they'd better stop taking it without a phone call as well. But someone helped me see it a different way. You're getting a $20 gift card out of the deal (on average), so consider the five minute phone call to be how you earn that $20. $20 for five minutes on the phone isn't a bad wage. Now, these companies know that a lot of people are going to sign up just to get the gift card with no intention to keep the membership, so of course they're going to try really hard to change your mind. They will be pushy, but they really weren't as bad as I expected. They basically make two attempts to get you to stay, first pointing out all of the benefits of membership, then offering further incentive to keep your account active. These incentives are not as good as they sound, believe me. After the two attempts, if you continue to say "no, thank you," they will cancel without giving you any more trouble.
The offers are:
Complete Home - $1 trial, $20 Lowe's gift card
Buyer's Advantage - $1 trial, $10 Target gift card
Privacy Guard - FREE trial, $30 Staples gift card
Clever Clubhouse - $1 trial, $20 Blockbuster gift card
Great Fun - $1 trial, $20 Mobil gift card (it said $10 but I got $20)
Some of these offers may have changed or ended since I completed them, so do make sure you know what you're getting.
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I feel lost today. Lost as to what to blog about, lost as to what steps to take next in my quest to make an income on the internet. I have plenty of ideas in my head in regards to both, but none of them feel right. The topics I could post about today all seem so depressing, and I really hate sounding like a miserable person all the time, because I'm really not. The money-making ideas I have all either feel too scummy, or I am just afraid of investing too much time and/or money and failing. I guess it all boils down to the fact that I let something affect me that shouldn't have. A petty, immature and unprofessional blogger who couldn't handle a bit of challenge to his opinions chose to lash out with personal attacks and hurtful words, and while I don't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he got to me, that's exactly what happened. So to that person I say congratulations - you proved what a dick you are.
I know that one thing that would help me immensely to make more money would be to start another blog separate from confoozled.com: an informational blog on a specific topic, rather than a personal journal like this one. I just don't know what topic I could possibly write about on a regular basis that people would actually be interested in. Obviously there are a lot of topics I'm interested in, which I occasionally touch upon here, but I'm not really what one would consider an expert in any of them. Maybe there's something I haven't even thought of - but what?
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The page I promised on ways you can help confoozled.com become profitable is now up. The first couple of options are super easy things you can do which don't cost you a cent. From there it goes to helping confoozled.com with purchases you were going to make anyway, on down to more direct ways to contribute if you feel inclined to do so (which I certainly don't expect).
I've also made some changes to the sidebar. Make sure you're checking it out now and then when you're here, because you might find some interesting stuff!
On a note related to all of this, I have to get something off my chest. There seems to be this sense of entitlement people feel when it comes to things on the internet, and I find it really disturbing. Back in November I addressed the rumor of a monthly fee for Facebook. That was just a rumor, but my point was this. Facebook has spent a lot of time and money to give people something for free. And don't tell me you don't value what they give you, because I hear people saying all the time how addicted they are to Facebook. And if Facebook were not able to continue to support itself on advertising alone, I value what they offer and would gladly pay a reasonable fee to continue using it.
Just recently I saw something even more appalling - a Facebook group for people against advertising on Facebook. So now not only are people unwilling to pay directly for what Facebook offers, they want to eliminate their only other source of income. It's like these people think that Facebook somehow owes them this free service they provide, but don't deserve to make any money for their efforts.
Another free service I use is Entrecard. It's a service that allows bloggers to gain exposure for their blogs by trading advertising with other bloggers. Just like Facebook, the costs of providing such a service add up, and those who work hard to give people something like this deserve to get something in return, too. So Entrecard recently introduced a paid advertising feature, where about half of the time, the widget on a member's blog will display a paid ad instead of the free one the blog owner has approved for that day. This is not only to help cover Entrecard's operating costs and compensate their staff, but also to allow people to turn the "credits" they earn from the system back into cash (something people have been demanding for a long time).
Now fortunately, after Entrecard responded to initial feedback and made a few policy changes (such as allowing any member to opt out of displaying paid ads on their widget without penalty for doing so), the majority of the reactions I've seen to this change are positive ones. I certainly am thrilled that I am going to be able to cash out the credits I've earned instead of using them to advertise on other blogs, since I haven't found the traffic I receive to be the kind that sticks around. But there are still some who are flipping out over the change, saying things like, "I like Entrecard but I'm not going to pay* to use their service," and, "Why should I help Entrecard make money?" (*The writer stated that allowing Entrecard to display paid ads on his widget was like paying them.) At least in this case, all the writer manages to do is display his lack of intelligence, especially when the only responses he can come up with to people who disagree with him are cheap insults (did you know I sound like a communist, and am one ugly ass woman to boot?).
Why should you help any company that provides you a free service to make money? Well let's look at it another way. Why should they give you that service? Why should they put in all of that hard work, and spend tons of their own money, to give you something for free, when they're not going to get anything back? Why should Facebook help you find old friends, and give you a place to share your life with them and countless fun games to play with them? Why should Entrecard pay upwards of $1,000 per month to support a network that lets you advertise on other blogs for free? Out of the kindness of their heart? Now who's the communist?
Everyone deserves to get something in return for their efforts. And in a capitalist America, that something is going to be money in some form, whether you pay it to them directly, or just tolerate their efforts to make it from other sources. Nothing in a capitalist market is truly free; everything has some kind of price. No one owes you anything with no strings attached.
As I've said before, I know that my blog is not something that provides a lot of value, and I don't expect most people to be willing to spend money to support it. What I do expect is that people be supportive of my efforts to earn something back for the hard work that I put in. Like most things on the internet, the only way I can do that is through advertising. If you don't want to see ads, by all means, use an ad blocker. No one pays for pure ad views on a site this low-ranked anyway. But don't ever suggest that I don't deserve to try to make money, that I should not expect anything in return for the time and effort I put in here.
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In case you didn't figure it out from the rickroll, yesterday's post was an April Fools' joke. (Also because it appeared in the new "attempts at humor" category, but you wouldn't have known that without looking.) I'm not giving up blogging, and I'm definitely not becoming a spammer!
The post was only partially tongue-in-cheek, though, because the results of the survey did suggest that most people are not willing to take action to financially support a blog - at least not a personal blog like this one - even when they'd be getting something in return (e.g. a link, ad space, or a product). And I get that. I'm not giving out earth-shattering information here; I'm basically just telling you about my life, and that's just not something people feel the need to compensate a person for. I totally understand that, and it's given me some clarity as to where I need to take things in order to make confoozled.com financially self-sufficient without expecting the money to come from readers. That means less focus on tip jars and Cafepress sales, and more on sponsored posting and other flat rate advertising that doesn't rely on sales for me to be paid. I do still need non-monetary support from my readers, though, and soon I will put together a page detailing how you can help me without spending a dime. If you at all enjoy what I write, and I figure you must if you keep coming back, I would hope you'd be willing to do some of these things at the very least.
Of course, you know that my ultimate goal isn't just to have confoozled.com support itself, but to one day make enough money from home to quit my day job. I realize now that a personal blog alone isn't going to do that. So this year I will be working to build some more narrowly targeted web sites that will hopefully have more earning potential than a personal blog does.
I will talk more about all of this later, but for now here's a quick report on March and my goal for April. March's online earnings total is $44.22. My goal for March was to finish project number two for my web design client, and I did with the exception of one last step, for which I am awaiting photos from the client. Therefore I haven't billed for the project yet. Affiliate earnings are down a bit, sponsored posts are picking back up, and everything else is about the same. April's goal is to revamp the confoozled.com sidebar some more, experiment with more forms of advertising, and put together that "ways to help" page I mentioned above.
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Well, I definitely learned something from the responses to my survey on supporting blogs. What I learned is that people don't believe in supporting them, period. People believe they have a God-given right to partake in a blogger's hard work, be entertained, informed, and intellectually stimulated by what we write, and never give anything back. How dare we expect anything in return for all of the hours we put in? "Just shut up and keep writing," is what I'm hearing.
I can't do that. I already work a full time day job for which I am underpaid. I was never looking for my blog alone to make me rich, but I've been trying to find ways for it to bring in just a little bit of money, just enough to make it worth the time and effort I put into it. Advertisers want nothing to do with me since Google says I'm worthless, and readers don't want to contribute either. So it's not worth my time, the time it takes away from my friends and my family, to continue writing here.
After all of my attempts to make an online income while still remaining honest and ethical have failed, I've discovered that the only real way to make money online is in the spam industry. Companies will pay me all kinds of money to trick my audience into giving them personal information, signing up for trial traps they can't get out of, and buying useless "revolutionary" products that are actually less effective than those that have existed for centuries. That last one is the doozy - these companies get such a kick out of scamming you that they will actually pay me more than the full price of the product, just for the satisfaction of knowing they sold you a useless piece of cloth that absorbs less liquid than a towel half its size!
Therefore, as of today, confoozled.com the blog is no more. I'll leave it up for a while for nostalgia's sake, but when the domain expires I won't be renewing it. I must focus my energy, from now on, on more lucrative online ventures. Yes, I am going into the spam business. Click here for more details on my new business plan.
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I want to thank a few bloggers for helping me promote my survey on supporting your favorite blogs. Thanks to The Transparent Hypnotist, MoneyXperiment.com, and Make Money Online - all great blogs which you should definitely check out.
But I still need more help! I only have three responses to the survey so far, and that is really not enough information to help me decide where to focus my energy and what changes I should make to confoozled.com. If you're a regular reader, I absolutely need your input, and if you have a friend you think might enjoy confoozled.com, why not send them over and tell them about the survey as well?
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My February online earnings have been tallied and come to a neither disappointing nor terribly exciting $49.03. I still am not quite finished with the web design project I had wanted to finish in February, but am slowly inching forward. It will continue to be my goal for March.
The majority of that money again came from affiliate commissions, admittedly with my mom to thank for most of it. The second most profitable activity was sponsored blog posts. Those are starting to pick up a bit, but I'm still seeing a lot of insulting $1-$3 offers from advertisers, and I just will not give my time and space on my site for such a small amount, unless it is a subject I'm passionate about. Ad revenue picked up a little bit, thanks to a text link that was purchased in the sidebar, and SocialSpark's new cost-per-click ads.
This month I am conducting a survey to find out just what you, my blog readers, are willing to do to support your favorite blogs. If you fill out the survey and provide a valid e-mail address, you'll be entered to win a special prize at the end of the month. (Sorry, my family members not eligible for this one!)
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Time to update you all on my efforts to make money online. In December, I earned $46.78, and in January, $65.85. The majority of that is affiliate commissions, which is surprising considering that used to be my least profitable method of earning. Paid blog posts have dropped significantly, and Cafepress and ScratchBack are still producing nothing. No, I didn't get around to increasing promotion of either, so that's to be expected. Google Adsense revenues continue to fluctuate, and I do have some plans to improve that as well. My problem is that while I have all sorts of ideas for increasing my earnings from various sources, I just don't have the time to implement them. I have, by the way, been working on projects for my web design client, I just have not completed any one project allowing me to invoice for it.
I'm changing my goal-setting strategy this year. Instead of monetary goals, each month I'm going to select a project to complete. For February I plan to complete and invoice at least one web design project. This should definitely be an attainable goal, since I'm about halfway through one of these projects already.
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I have big plans this year for some new web sites, and one way I intend to advertise them is through sponsored blog posts, also known as blog advertising. You're probably a little bit familiar with this form of advertising, as I have sold sponsored posts here on confoozled.com for quite a while, and it has in fact been my most profitable method of earning money online. Based on the response I've seen to those posts I've done myself, I definitely think it can be an effective way to advertise.
As a blogger I've been disappointed in the last couple of months to see a lot fewer advertisers taking advantage of paid blogging as a way to advertise. You've probably noticed that the number of paid posts I've made has dramatically decreased. The requests from advertisers just aren't out there, especially for blogs like mine which may rank lower with the search engines but are not necessarily unpopular. The offers that are out there are priced so low it's an insult. I make $14 an hour at my day job, so why would I spend an hour of my time researching and writing up a 500 word post and making sure I have just the right links and just the right title to make the advertiser happy, for a measly $3? Some advertisers have even demanded that bloggers accept less than the minimum amount set by the advertising network!
I recently joined a new paid blogging network, PayingPost, in the hopes that it will bring more sponsored post opportunities my way. They are just starting out, but I'm hoping with time they will attract some high quality advertisers who recognize the true value of blog advertising, and maybe even create some healthy competition to give the paid blogging industry the boost it needs.
If you have an online business, or even just a web site you're looking to promote, I would really encourage you to give blog advertising a try. Just remember to be respectful of your bloggers' time. Three to five dollars is a fair offer for a quick 100 word post with one or two required links, but the more you ask for and the pickier you are, the more compensation a blogger is going to expect. Remember that disallowing in-post disclosure (i.e. asking the blogger not to disclose that the post is sponsored) is worth a slight price hike as well.
(Disclosure: This post sponsored by PayingPost.)
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Back in August, we celebrated my 300th blog post on confoozled.com with my very first blog contest. It had taken nearly six years to get to 300 posts... and now, not quite six months later, I've hit 400! I've worked hard to try to post one entry every weekday, and most of the time I succeed. This week I tried to make up for the fact that I missed posting on Tuesday (Wednesday's post was supposed to be Tuesday's; I just didn't finish it in time) by posting twice yesterday. And from that experiment I learned that one post per day is definitely confoozled.com's sweet spot; no one read the second one. So, I will still make every effort to post every weekday, but never more than once in the same day, even if I miss a day.
Also, I know I never got around to posting a December online income report. Both December's and January's numbers will be posted in February.
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I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving (or just a great four-day break from me, if you're not in the US  ). I can't believe November is over already!
My online income goal for November was $150, due to web design work I knew I would be starting, but didn't know how many hours I would be putting in. Well, it turned out to be about three times as many hours as I'd guessed, and my grand total for November was $456.52! Obviously a whopping majority of that is from the web design, but I also made about the same as last month from sponsored blog posts, and even managed to pull in a couple of bucks in affiliate commissions. Ad revenue, however, went way down. I don't know why no one was clicking my Google ads this last month, but I only earned a penny! It may be that I didn't post as many entries with image ads floated at the top left. I haven't really been keeping track of that.
The two other categories that are not producing are CafePress sales and ScratchBack tips. I probably haven't promoted these aggressively enough. Since we're here I'll remind you (and I might think about moving them up higher on the sidebar as well). Christmas is coming, and I know you aren't going to buy your loved ones stuff with my logo on it, but there are also some products featuring an adorable Chihuahua princess! That design may be replaced by a new photo at any time, so if you love the current one, don't waste any time! And, if you love my blog and want to leave a tip in exchange for a link, remember that you have a one in five chance at doubling your money if you're one of the first five to do so.
I still have more design work for the same client this month, but probably not as many hours. I'm going to estimate about half the time, and set my December goal at $210. I'll probably delay the web games section until after the new year, as I really just want to relax, have fun, and enjoy the holiday season in my free time this month.
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With all of my computer problems last month I never got around to posting my September online earnings, or setting a goal for October. My goal for September, if you'll remember, was $45. I did exceed that goal by about 27% with a grand total of $57.44. In October, despite having no home computer most of the month, I still managed to make $32.63. Most of my income is still coming from sponsored blog posts and reviews, which brought in $32.20 in September and $26 in October.
Affiliate marketing continues to be challenging for me, since, like I've mentioned before, I'm not a person who is good at selling things unless it is something I have extremely positive personal experience with. Since merchants rarely give affiliates free products to try out, and I don't have the extra cash to be buying things just to review them, this doesn't happen very often. Another challenge is that whenever I find something I'm really interested in promoting, for some unknown reason the merchant only allows promotion via e-mail. This still really bothers me because I feel that it encourages spam. Even though they say you should promote to opt-in lists only, I receive large amounts of spam in my own inbox every day promoting these same products.
Here's an example of one of these e-mail only campaigns. With the economy the way it is, one of the ways I'm saving money this Christmas is by sending paper greeting cards only to those few of my loved ones who don't have e-mail. I wanted to recommend this strategy to my readers, and it just so happens that VistaPrint is offering 10 free custom holiday cards (pay shipping only), and giving affiliates a pretty generous commission. But, you guessed it... I am only allowed to promote the offer through e-mail. What good reason do they have to stop people from posting this offer to their blogs?
Now, since I've told you about this, there's nothing stopping you from just going to VistaPrint and taking advantage of it without me getting the credit. If you do want me to send you the e-mail, however, so that I can have the commission, subscribe to this mailing list. It's a double opt-in list, which means you have to confirm your subscription before you'll receive anything. I'm going to use it to send out promotions I'm only allowed to share via e-mail. This will never be spammy; I'll only send out things I think are a really good idea, products I use and love myself, and deals I think are too good to pass up. Now I know if you're someone who doesn't know me from the next blogger on your feed reader, you have no reason to want to give me your affiliate commissions rather than someone else. And I don't expect you to. By all means, if you know someone personally who is trying to make money with affiliate programs, please give them as many sales as you possibly can. But if you're one of my friends or family and I'm the only affiliate marketer you know, it would be so appreciated if you would be willing to help me out... especially if there is something you were going to buy anyway. Join the list, and also if there's ever a purchase you're considering and you're curious as to whether you might be able to get me a commission for it, please ask!
So what do I have planned for this month? The biggest thing is that tomorrow I will begin working on a blog template design job for a pretty well-known writer. I will reveal more when the work is done, but for now I'll just say that I'm really excited about this, and not only about the income this job is going to generate, but also what it could do for my ability to get more design work in the future. I'm also going to try to get started on a web games section for confoozled.com. There will be free, ad-supported games, as well as free demo games which pay me a commission when you buy the full version. I had originally planned to launch this on its own domain, but I've decided that for right now I can't afford to buy any new domain names. Perhaps I will move it to its own domain later when I'm making more.
Because of the design work I'll be doing, I'm setting an ambitious goal this month of $150. I very well may exceed this goal by quite a bit, which would make me very happy. But since I honestly don't know how many hours I'm going to end up putting in, I'm keeping the goal reasonable. Wish me luck!
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I'm a big fan of VistaPrint. I got some business cards and refrigerator magnets from them back when I had my attempted eBay business, and they were surprisingly good quality for the price I paid. If I ever need printed marketing materials for any of the work at home opportunities I've been trying out, VistaPrint is the first place I will go.
Here's a product I didn't know VistaPrint had available: car magnets. Since I don't have a car of my own (and Chris would never let me put one on the Altima), they're not something I could really use. But for anyone else out there with a business that could benefit from some local marketing, these would be great. I know Chris and I notice advertisements on cars all the time and go home to look them up and see what they're all about. I think the key is to make it vague... just enough to pique a person's curiosity... and be sure to include a highly visible and easy to remember web site URL. By the way, you can use coupon code "CarDoor25" to get 25% off all car door magnets.
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Something I'm quickly finding out as I explore affiliate marketing as a way to make money online is that I am not a natural born salesperson like some people are. Some people, like Chris, seem to have a salesperson gene. He can sell anything to anyone. When he worked in the electronics department at Wal-Mart back in Oregon, they were constantly amazed at his ability to sell three or four computers, televisions, and other big ticket items, per day... when the rest of them were lucky if they sold one.
As an affiliate one's job is to pre-sell the products or services one is promoting: to convince the audience not just to click on the link or ad, but to give out personal information or make a purchase. Not only do I have no talent for selling things I haven't used myself, even those things I truly believe in I can only seem to sell to family members. I can't even sell my eBay items!
Perhaps the problem is that I just don't have a big enough audience yet, which is something I continue to struggle with. My Google PageRank is low, and will probably continue to be as long as I accept paid posting opportunities through PayPerPost and similar programs. But with those programs I am guaranteed to be paid for the work I put in, so until I build other streams of reliable income I'm not willing to give them up. I am generating traffic through various social networks, but still haven't found the magical spell to convert those visitors into subscribers.
No matter, I'm not giving up yet, so I thought today I would give a rundown on the affiliate networks I've joined and my first impressions of them.
Market Leverage
Pros: Many claim it to be the highest paying program in the industry. There are many merchants which offer extremely high payouts for a single action, sometimes not even requiring a sale (paying instead for free trial signups or e-mail address submissions).
Cons: Insist upon telephone interview before approving new affiliates. Minimum of $25 earnings required before publisher is paid. Extremely restrictive with marketing rules. Many campaigns are e-mail only, which I feel encourages spam. Few campaigns allow publishers to offer incentives to customers, and in order to incentivize you must do so exclusively (i.e. sites offering incentives cannot promote non-incentive campaigns at all). Poorly written text links do not fit into natural writing flow, and cannot be changed without approval. Web site is difficult to navigate and has very little help available without having to contact staff directly, and in order to refer to terms and conditions and other information, one must actually log out.
Money Earned to Date: $0. And not for lack of trying, as this is the network I have been working with the longest.
Keep reading...
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One of the secrets of affiliate marketing is to register domain names and build niche web sites around the products you want to promote. Now I love my web host, even though they're not the cheapest in the world. The excellent service and support they provide is well worth the extra money, and it would take a serious problem to get me to move confoozled.com to another host. But if I'm going to register several new domains and build a new web site for each one, I'm going to need some cheap hosting. And that's where the Web Hosting Geeks come in. They offer independent reviews of inexpensive web hosts, as well as hosting companies listed by category, such as the best hosts offering free domain registration. Many of the hosting plans they promote come with free advertising credits for Yahoo! and Google, which can be a great help to those getting started with affiliate marketing.
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Since a fourteen-day free trial is apparently only really thirteen days long, and the aforementioned drop shipping network decided to charge me for a month's membership on the morning of the fourteenth day before their customer service lines were even open, I am trying one last strategy on eBay to try and earn my $50 back. I have listed a few items, and I will be listing more over the next several days, so if there are kids in your life who like books, you might want to keep an eye on my listings. I could have sworn I saw a way to subscribe to a feed last night, but now I don't see it. However, you can select "Save this search" and have eBay e-mail you as I add more items.
By the way, these drop ship suppliers only ship to US addresses, but I recently heard about a way around that for international buyers. MyUS.com lets you sign up for a US mailing address where you can have packages shipped, and they will forward them to you for a nominal fee (on average 70% less than what most US retailers will charge you for international shipping).
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