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Watch me make 51 grand on internet!

Shawn Collins is an affiliate marketer who has been in business since 1997! He is a co-founder of the Affiliate Summit and co-editor-in-chief of FeedFront Magazine. I was reading his blog Affiliate Tip and found som really good advices for affiliate newbies.

Shawn Collins

Here is what Shawn would do if he was starting up an affiliate right know with his experience:

1. You need a passion for something.
2. Get a hosting plan with several domain names, lots of bandwidth and automated wordpress installs.
3. Get an Aweber account (that is very popular mailing service).
4. Find 2-3 things you are passionate about.
5. Prepare a copy.
6. Register a domain name.
7. Put up your blog.
8. Write in your own voice.
9. Monetize after 5-10 posts
10. Find relevant merchants and put up 1-2 banners and some text links (include affiliate links in your blog posts).
11. TEST, TEST, TEST which are doing best!
12. Start using Aweber: create an email follow-up series (7 steps to…, or use your blog posts as newsletter content)
13. Enable RSS by email
14. Give a couple of months to build traffic (3-4), than recheck.

When looking for a perfect Wordpress theme, I did some research and I discovered worlds most sucessful blog designs have lots of things in common.

Blogs analyzed

www.shoemoney.com
www.johnchow.com
www.problogger.com
www.lifehack.org
www.smashingmagazine.com
www.doshdosh.com
www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

These are all established blogs and high earners also.

Header

• Nice and memorable logo with slogan.
• Horizontal navigation with key elements.
• Banner ad placement (468×60 or 728×90 – Shoemoney).
• Search box (internal or Google custom search).

Sidebar

• Subscribe/Follow buttons: They provide several options:
  • built in RSS Subscribe button via email
  • Feedburner button
  • TwitterCounter button
• Ad placements often called “Sponsors” with 125×125 ads (Shoemoney also has a 120×600 ad block.)
• “What`s hot” zone is what it actually tells it is. Popular are:
  • Recent posts
  • Top posts  /Best of
  • Top commentators
  • Tag cloud
  • Twitter updates
• Own products – sidebar can be also used for promoting own products and services.
• Categories – simple list of categories.

Main Content

This is where these blogs get a bit creative.

Johnchow.com uses featured articles (5 of them are changing ) on top, recent posts on left and featured video in the middle of front page.

Darren Rowse from problogger.net uses similar layout with one featured post at top, recent posts on left and weekly video post in the middle.

Lifehack.org also uses featured articles concept, while others (Shoemoney , Entrepreneurs Journey, Dosh Dosh, Smashing magazine ) have latest article on very top of the page followed by others below.

It looks this is more of a personal preference, since both ways seem to work.

Number of posts and their length

First goes blog, number of posts and length (intro means you have to click to read more and full post means…you know what):

• Shoemoney, 10, full post
• John Chow:,on frontpage: 9, intro, on blog page: 5, full post
• Problogger, on frontpage: 8, intro, on blog page: 10, full post
• Lifehack, 2 featured, 15 latest, all intro
• Smashing Magazine, 8, intro
• Dosh Dosh, 9, intro
• Enterpreneurs Journey, 5, intro.

It looks the average of my observed blogs would be probably 8 or 9 intro posts.

Post structure:

• Title=H1, there was no exception for this one, however Wordpress  out of the box puts titles in H2 tags, which is not ok for seo! So make sure you have all titles in H1!
• Date (time of day is not obligatory since people come from different time zones)
• Category
• Number of comments
• Author
• Links to social networks
• Tags (Smashing Magazine)
• Comments

Footer:

• Secondary “What`s hot” zone
• Latest/Top
• Contact / Add to social networks buttons
• Copyright
• Bottom navigation
• Link to Blog Designer
• Categories, Archives
• Resources, Recommendations, Featured Sites

Conclusion

It looks there are some no-brainers that apply for most of the blog designs and follow the usability that produces results. I changed my theme from Wordpress default, to one that is quite in line with above sites.

51 Grand Before and After

What is affiliate marketing?

Hopefully this post will clear many things about affiliate marketing for beginners.

Wikipedia:

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

Commission Junction:

Affiliate marketing is an online advertising channel in which advertisers pay publishers only for results, such as a visitor making a purchase or filling out a form, rather than paying simply to reach a particular audience…

Concept of affiliate marketing © Wikipedia

My job as an affiliate marketer is to drive sales to my or an affiliate website. For that I recieve a commision from the seller.

How is it tracked?

Sellers provide me with unique sales link or ID which I then use to refer people. When I login to sellers website I am provided with various statistics that show me how successful I am.

When a visitors clicks on my link, a cookie is set on the visitor`s browser that stores my unique ID on visitors computer. This enables me to get a commission even if visitor decided to buy a product a week later.

Attention: If visitor clicks on another affiliate link after he has clicked mine, the commission goes to the owner of last affiliate link.

Compensation methods

Majority of affiliate programs use revenue sharing or cost per sale (CPS) compensation method, while others use cost per action (CPA) also called pay per lead (PPL). There are also some special compensation methods, such as pay per call and pay per install, but are not very common.

Commision can be fixed or a percentage of products worth. Ussually I get paid from 2% to 50 %, some digital products could also offer 75% commision. Fixed fees start at few dollars, $10, $30 or $100 are common, but in some cases could be also more.

Where to promote products?

Successful affiliate marketers use various channels to promote products and services, often combining them to get best results. Most common channels / website types affiliate marketers use are:

• Pay Per Click Search Engines
• Comparison shopping websites and directories
• Coupon and rebate websites
• Content websites and niche websites
• Product review websites
• Personal websites, Blogs and niche blogs
• E-mail lists
• Shopping directories
• CPA networks
• Free digital products with affiliate links
• Niche forums
• Social networks

Best Affiliate Networks

Affiliate networks are companies that find advertisers/sellers for you and provide you with affiliate links, advertising materials and statistics. Most popular are:

• Commission Junction
• ShareaSale
• Linkshare
• Clickbank

References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensation_methods
3. https://www.cj.com/about/affiliate_marketing.html
4. Wealthy Affiliate Membership Club

My plans for week 2 (March 23-29) are:

• explore the Wealthy Affiliate Club  into details,
• read blog archives of my idols – Top Earning Online Marketers, there is huuge amount of information in their archives, so this will probably be an ongoing task for several weeks. I will start with Shoemoney,
• learn the basics of affiliate marketing, gather and post the best resources,
• learn more about copywriting and how to write for my blog,
• research how to promote my blog,
• prepare a media kit and advertising page,
• set up a contact form.

Wow…this is a already lot of work for one week. So lets get to work.

My plans for first week were:

• configure this wordpress blog
• discover what are best ways to make money on internet,
• find people who are already making good money online and see how they are doing it,
• join best online forums to get feedback from community,
• learn basic terms and get familiar with online tools.

Here is what I was doing from March 16-22:

1. I configured my 51 Grand Blog, installed plugins, theme and some other stuff. Read exactly how I did it.
2. Than I spent lots of time googling and reading forums and blogs looking for ways to make money online. You might be surprised what I learned.
3. I decided to join Wealthy Affiliate club (paid), to learn as much as possible about affiliate marketing. I suggest you do it too.
4. I found out who is making millions online: Top Internet Earners, Top Earning Online Marketers.
5. Found many internet marketing forums and joined SitePoint, Digital Point and WA Forums.

What I found out?

There is so much information on internet you can easily get distracted. I am trying to organize my day in several working blocks to be able to complete my tasks. Writing a post every day is definitely not an easy task!

I need to focus and put my notes into practice. This also goes for finding the next best thing online. There is no such thing. Only knowledge, hard work and lots of experimenting.

Only those who like what they do can make millions online.

How are you guys doing?

It is very important to introduce yourself to the audience before you start talking. And why should it be different online?

Maki from Dosh Dosh made a comprehensive list of 26 affiliate marketing forums which are also webmater forums.

Here is a list of top internet marketing forums I recommend:

1. Digital Point, 270.000 members, 60.000+ active members, Shoemoney started on Digital Point (check his DP profile) .
2. Sitepoint, 320.000 members, has an integrated marketplace.
3. WebmasterWorld, free to read, need to subscribe to post
4. SEO Chat, Seo focused, great resource for optimization.
5. V7n, 68,211 members
6. Wealthy Affiliate Forum – paid, extremely valuable information, you need to subscribe to Wealthy Affiliate Club

I joined Digital Point Forums, Site Point and Wealthy Affiliate Forum.

My username is 51grand. See you inside.

Hi guys! I decided to research who are the top earning bloggers and online marketers that I can learn from.

1. Jeremy Schoemaker, Shoemoney.com
2. John Chow, JohnChow.com
3. Darren Rowse, Problogger.net
4. Zac Johnson, ZacJohnson.com
5. Shawn Collins, blog.affiliatetip.com
6. Yaro Starak, entrepreneurs-journey.com
7. Paul Bourque, Uberaffiliate.com
8. Tyler Cruz, TylerCruz.com
9. Amit Mehta, superaffiliatemindset.com
10. Maki, doshdosh.com
11. Brian Clark, copyblogger.com
12. Carl Ocab, carlocab.com

As you can see this is my personal mix of blogs I will be closely watching from now on. I use a firefox extension called Morning Coffe, which loads preset blogs on various days of week so I can explore them.

I will be further researching people and blogs that are successfull online and expand this topic when I found new resources. Until then, check these blogs, you may find some gold.

Do you know a good resource?

Who is making millions online?

Michael Dunlop from Retire at 21 compiled a list of Top Internet Entrepreneurs under 30. Maybe you don`t know their names, but you sure know their brands.

Lets check a few of most popular:

• Mark Zuckenberg – www.facebook.com
• Chad Hurley – www.youtube.com
• Alexander Levin – www.imageshack.us
• Matt Mullenweg – wordpress.org
• Kevin Rose – digg.com

What do their websites have in common?

They all provide something valuable to their users.

• Facebook is a free social community network.
• Youtube provides watching and uploading free videos.
• Image Shack provides free image hosting.
• Wordpress is a superb free blogging platform.
• Digg is a free community for sharing links to content.

Noticed the word free? So how do they make money then? They monetize their business with advertisements. But this is not the main point really.

What is key to all these people and websites?

1. They provide the best services in the world for their niche!
2. They have been providing it long before advertisers came around!
3. They love what they do. They truly enjoy it!

Whoa! I`m so excited!

I just joined Wealthy Affiliate (March 18)! I decided to check them out for the first month and than see. The membership costs $39 month or $29.90 if paid for 12 months.

Wealthy Affiliate is a membership club that teaches you exactly how to make money with affiliate marketing.

There are so many tools, resources and information that is hard to comprehend at one day. I will spend a few hours looking around to get familiar with it.

You can help me reach my goal!

Here is my first earning opportunity. If you decide to join Wealthy Affiliate and if you find information on 51 Grand useful, you can sign up through my affiliate link and help me reach my goal. There is no cost for you, but I will be making $14 for each month you stay subscribed. Thank you!