Affiliate Marketing Can Replace The Day Job

It was way back in 1997 when I got my first taste of affiliate marketing. I remember seeing an animated battleship-gray banner flashing words at me and I was filled with deep curiosity and intrigue. The words were, find "hidden assets.." and the product was Net Detective. I'll try to show you this banner as an image below - but an animation may not work.

So in 1998 I placed the code for this banner on a web page with some relevant text, and like a fisherman I dropped this 'bait' into the ocean of the search engines! Wham! I made my first sale as an affiliate and the company owed me $US10. What an awakening. What a feeling of pride and hope.. I could do it. Sitting at a computer in Australia I could submit a web page and start to make commissions across the world in a stronger currency!

  Affiliate marketing became my obsession. I was making more and more sales, especially when Google Adwords Select first started up in 2002 and at the peak with Net Detective I earned $3,298 in a single month that increased to $AUD6,000 when our Aussie dollar was only worth .50 cents of an American greenback.

But something happened to our commissioned affiliates' heaven. Too many people found out about this easy way of earning extra income. Internet money making became the buzz and Google cash methods were being taught all over the web. Most affiliates were using www.ClickBank.com to source their merchant products -- and to this day hyped products are still being sold, teaching people how to make money online, using the magical combination of Google to drive targeted traffic plus ClickBank to quickly and conveniently provide the products to sell. It is so highly organized that anyone can do it.

Next move came from Google again: Adsense. Easier still and like an automated universal affiliate program where you get paid a proportion of the advertiser's cost per click expense. Millions of web sites suddenly appeared, machine-made, to reap the harvest of easy Adsense earnings on every topic and keyword under the sun! But you couldn't use Adwords traffic to drive people to click merrily on Adsense pages. That's called arbitrage.

Arbitrage fitted very, very neatly with another affiliate type or style of working: Cost Per Action or CPA Networks where the affiliate is paid when the prospect takes an action such as entering his zipcode or her email address in a web form. Because the prospect doesn't have to whip out a credit card or make any payment, conversion rates are higher and smart affiliates have made fortunes driving people to CPA offers online using Google Adwords. There are many traps for new players here so "don't try this too quickly at home!"  The traps involve understanding exactly how to optimize a Google campaign. You must research your keywords, track every action for profitability and write the best advertisements humanly possible. Competition is now so intense that you cannot fail in any of these areas I just mentioned. The good news is that there are several tools available now that show you the ads and the keywords being used successfully by top marketers. I can give you such a tool.

I think I have joined over 75 affiliate programs. Bits and pieces are scattered over my 5 computers -- some of which are dead or dying slowly -- and I've made hundreds of thousands of Australian dollars as a home based affiliate marketer, thanks to that first intriguing, animated banner that caught my eye back in 1997-1998. It is the words that sell. We are so hard wired and conditioned to language as a trigger for our emotions. We can feel a fear of loss, or an insane greed, just from the words (web copy) that our brains absorb, sub-consciously. To learn more in this fascinating area of marketing psychology I suggest you do a search for the name, Clayton Makepeace. Or... John Carlton.

Recently I decided to focus one whole month - June, 2009 - working with the affiliate program of Russell Brunson of Boise, Idaho. Strangely, ClickBank.com lives in the same city....but please visit my home business web site below and you'll discover exactly why I've settled on that training system - deciding to work like a maniac into the wee small hours -  until inevitable success comes rushing into my email inbox as notifications of sales. It is worth the extra effort for the pride you get. You just need a constant-action mindset. Relentlessness.

I remain, your avid Internet supporter.

Geoff Dodd

Perth 6000 Australia