I’ve recently delved into the world of affiliate marketing. I’ve seen the stuff for years, but never really gotten into it. The idea is simple enough, you get paid a “commission” for selling someone else’s “product.” These products can be anything from ring tones to dating sites to tuna fish. The key to all of this is getting traffic to the offer for less of a cost than what you are being paid – easier said than done.

I’ve studied this for some time now, but am far from educated on it. You could say I’m very low on the affiliate-marketing-street-smarts scale. However, here’s a few of my very simple observations on the methods people use to get the traffic and make the moolah.

The Brute Force Method

Send as many people to your landing page as possible (even if it sucks) and a few are bound to complete the offer and earn you some coin. This is by far the easiest method. You don’t have to have a good offer. You don’t have to have a good sales/landing page. You don’t have to have a good domain. You just have to have traffic.

This problem is, how do you get that traffic? One of the primary ways of generating traffic in affiliate marketing is through PPC advertising. Well, if your offer or your landing page stinks, you’re going to be paying out the you-know-what for junk traffic. Operating at a loss isn’t the most profitable position is it?

The only way this works is if you can drive hoards of traffic without paying for it – usually not an easy task. I read the blogs of many who have run this route. Their final conclusion is usually that affiliate marketing is a scam, no one makes money in it and Santa Clause is a lie.

The Look-At-Me-I’m-a-Fricken-Genious Method

Sending a few interested people to a targeted offer with a well done landing page is a much better way to go. This keeps your costs much lower as you’re not paying for hundreds or thousands of clicks and your conversion rate higher as the people comming to your sales page are actually interested in what you have to offer. Lower advertising costs plus higher conversions equal higher profits.

But, if it were only so easy. This method requires two very important things (and two of the closest guarded secrets of affiliate marketers) – great keywords and a great landing page. Both of which take a lot of research and experimenting to get. That’s more work than most people are willing to put into it and come to many of the same conclusions that the ‘Brute Force’ people come to.

Are you and idiot?

Obviously one of the two methods above isn’t going to win American Idol (or County Star Idol or Canadian Mountie Idol.) The thing is, most people try to succeed in affiliate marketing by using Method A. Sure, they’ll tell you that their keywords are targeted and they’ve spent hours stealing other people’s landing pages. But, their stats say otherwise.

Which category do you fit into? Honestly, most of us are fooling ourselves. We have to look at this stuff objectively. Affiliate marketing is a tough business, but if you’re really willing to put the work into it, it can pay off in big ways.

I’m spreadin’ some link lovin’ to my twitter followers. Props to Kate Brodock and Internet Marketing – Best Web Ezy. Want some linkage for yourself? Follow me on twitter!

Dear John,

I’ve been saving my Entrecard credits for some time now and have finally horded enough to place my humble card on your (pricy) Entrecard widget for a day. Since you’re probably new to my blog, I’d like to first say welcome, and second, show you around a bit. So kick off your sneakers and come on in!

My name is Jeremy Waller. I’ve been blogging now for about a year and a half. I’m a bit of a finance nerd, tech junkie and entrepreneur. After you subscribe to my RSS feed, you’ll get approximately 3 posts per week on these topics (or whatever else I decide to blog about. It’s my blog. I make the rules) freshly picked from the ripe fields of my mind. I’m a part-time blogger and just don’t have the time to be a posting machine like you are, but the posts I do put out are mighty tasty (Dot Com Dump anyone?)

Go check out some of my ramblings and, before heading out, why don’t you join MyBlogLog Community and become one of my followers on twitter (Just in case you were wondering, I’m one of your followers.) I’m giving some link love to anyone who follows me.

Thanks again for stopping by!

Sincerely,
Jeremy Waller

“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.” – Cecil Beaton

There are millions of blogs in the blogosphere and, unless your blogging about teaching your parrot advanced calculus, thousands in your niche. Right now, the market is flooded with other blogs just like yours. What is it that makes your different? Why should I follow your blog on making money/SEO/funny videos/whatever over the next guy (or gal)? Like the wise Cecil Beaton says above (actually I’m not really sure if he was wise, but that’s a darn good quote up there) you don’t want to be a play-it-safer. Make your blog different.

Take a controversial position – 2+2 = 7?

It’s easy to follow the crowd. It’s easy to find some popular topic and blog about it just like everyone else. You love twitter? So does everyone else…including me >blush<. Try standing out. Write about the 10 things you hate about twitter or tell people how they can get rich by dropping out of high school to flip burgers.

People don’t want to hear the same thing from you that they’ve heard from everyone else. (Let me throw a marginally off-topic nugget of wisdom in here also – if you are regurgitating news you’ve read somewhere else, spice it up – add your thoughts, add a video on or find a complementing post from a fellow blogger. That’s what I did in my post a few weeks ago on how expensive text messaging is.)

Make your design unique

To the first time visitor to your blog, it doesn’t matter how great your content is. I don’t care if you’re Agatha Christie (world’s best selling fiction author, BTW), if your site is ugly, people won’t stick around to read your potential award winning post on the sleep patterns of sheep.

Upon starting a blog, most people set-up WordPress and begin blogging with the default theme (very boring mind you.) Some get a little more adventurous and Google “WordPress Themes” and grab the coolest looking one from the first site they come to. So now you and 6 million people are using the same template (look at you, you’re so unique now!)

This leaves you with two viable options – purchase one or customize one that someone else has done most of the hard work on. Purchasing a template is a great idea, but not always an option for the low-income, part-time blogger. I prefer to customize a pre-made template. I find a template that I like and modify some of the images and formatting to fit what I’m looking for (that’s a whole other topic, more on this in a future post.)

The point is, most first time visitors will only glance at your page for a few seconds before moving on. Be sure to grab their attention with a unique blog design.

Make your blog you

When it comes down to it, your blog has to be your blog. Why is blogging so popular? Because people are interested in getting information from real people, not a faceless news site. Whatever your topic is, your blog is really all about you – your interests, your writing style (voice) and your personality. You is what will make your blog stand out from the crowd – even if you have the dullest blog in the world. This is a huge reason that the biggest bloggers are the biggest bloggers. People like them – their interests, their writing style and their personality. I hope my personality shines though on WallerBlog dot Com (I feel like it does anyways.) I like to be a little snarky, a little nerdy and a little outside-of-the-proverbial-box in my ramblings.

If your goal is to have a blog where you’re the only reader (family doesn’t count) then be the same as every other blogger out there. Otherwise, you have to be different. These ideas above are by no means a complete list on how to make your blog stand out from the millions of others out there, but it’s a starting point. Go, be different!