Affiliate Odyssey

So, this morning I’ve been watching and digesting Jeremy Palmer’s first webinar in The Black Ink Project.

What a beauty.

This is just about as valuable a resource as you’re ever going to find and incredibly, it’s free!

Here are some nuggets I took away from the 79 minutes:

1. No niche is too competitive.
2. Look for niches where you have knowledge or experience or passion and preferably all three - this is more important than what the niche is. Zac Johnson has a post today which pretty much reiterates what Jeremy is saying.
3. Look to take a small part of a large pie or a large part of a small pie.
4. Where niche magazines are on newsagents’ shelves, there’s gold to be mined.
5. Stop chasing markets and market conditions - stick to what you know as per number 2.
6. Direct linking is still a great way to test a merchant’s viability in terms of conversion.
7. If you’re running an affiliate campaign at under 1% conversion, it’s time for a rethink.

Jeremy’s mantra for affiliates is “Do One Thing. Do It Really Well”.

It’s time to choose.

It’s time to win.

So everyone seems to have heard of Jeremy Palmer and QuitYourDayJob.com - except me!

Well somewhere in the ether, I came across a new training course he’s running for affiliate marketers and what’s more, its free.

After my miserable failure on Eric Guigere’s One Post A Day (Eric didn’t succeed either BTW), I feel it’s time to accept another challenge requiring commitment - in this case 8 weeks.

Jeremy’s new course is called The Black Ink Project and claims to take an aspiring affiliate marketer from first principles through to a working affiliate program.

In his words:

The project focuses on four key areas:

• Setting realistic goals, based on your time and budget. You’ll discover how much time and money you need to invest to achieve your goals.
• Researching prospective opportunities. You’ll learn out how to avoid potential pitfalls and find the right niche and the best advertisers.
• Learning the software, scripts, and tools to help you create your site. You’ll not only leave the course with a complete tool belt, you’ll learn how to use your tools alone and together to create beautiful high-converting sites.
• Develop and launch a campaign from start to finish. At the end of the course, you’ll have a complete action plan and checklist you can use for future sites.

The course started yesterday, 5th May, with a webinar which ran at 3pm PST or 11pm here in the UK which is a tad late for me to have the necessary concentration levels. I plan to catch the recorded versions, broadcast the day after, so I’m looking forward the first session today.

I really hope I can keep up with this program as it seems to offer so much and I’ll of course be keeping a log of my progress here.

Can’t wait to get cracking…

I’ve been doing lot of soul searching lately and I’ve come to realise that I prefer to blog about the emotional and mental side of affiliate marketing more than the practical.

There are more than enough “How To”  sites out there but maybe not enough “Why To” blogs so, from now on, that’s what I’ll be doing.

For many new internet  marketers, myself included, the lure of limitless wealth, copious free time and an altogether fabulous lifestyle, is almost overpowering.

Affiliate marketing promises to return a steady income stream, 24/7, for seemingly modest  amounts of work, but the truth couldn’t be more different.

To be even moderately successful requires far more work than any paid job I’ve ever had, but here’s where it gets interesting - it’s actually fun and doesn’t feel like work!

I think about marketing all the time - it keeps me awake at night.

Every situation, every person I meet, every product I use, I ‘m always looking for the angle, the way to leverage each experience to benefit  my marketing efforts.

In short, I’ve become obsessed.

What’s more, I think you have to be like this if you’re going to succeed.

It’s an itch you have just have to scratch.

I’m sitting, MacBook on my lap, writing this post.

Electric 6 are on Kerrang singing High Voltage, the familiar “ping” for new email arrives.

I flick over to Mail to check what’s come in and spot a new post in my RSS feeds by Dave N about a quite improbable offer from one.com for free domain and hosting for a year - I check it out. Might be worth a punt for a year.

The dog barks and I need to let her out, the fire’s dying down too - need more coal.

The ads come on Kerrang so time to channel surf  - Scuzz looks good, Maroon 5 do not.
Oh no - just noticed Wordpress needs updating for this blog - I’ve already updated 4 other blogs today.

It has gone midnight and I’ve achieved nowhere near as much as I’d like.

It’s like this for most people, most days.

It’s why the girl at the checkout, distracted by thoughts of the coming weekend’s drinking, gives you the wrong change.

It’s why your bank takes 5 days to sort out a problem that should take 5 minutes.

It’s why most classrooms are out of control.

It’s why I haven’t made enough any money.

It’s why things have to change.

Choosing The Domain Name 

Domain naming is the most hotly debated subject on the web with camps split between those who recommend short, memorable names and those who believe keyword-rich names are the way to go.

Eric recently posted 3 Steps To Keyword-Rich Domains which, when looking at an affiliate campaign, seems the right way to go.

My new gardening site is going to need as many factors in its favour as possible and regardless of the debate, I’d like to get maximum SEO benefits.

About a week ago, I had an idea that I might like to do a gardening blog so I did a similar exercise and came up with the domain cheapgarden.co.uk (the .com had already gone) but there was always the chance, using Eric’s method might turn up something better.

Following Eric’s advice, I tried the following set of keywords in the Google Keyword Selector Tool:

garden, gardening, gardens, how to garden, garden tips

Looking at the results, I had one eye on advertiser competition (as I’m going to be running a PPC campaign) and the other eye on possible domain names.

After entering the keyword combos into GoDaddy, nothing really stood out so cheapgarden.co.uk it is!

The beauty of this domain is that it is reasonably short, easy to remember and its keywords fit in front of lots of other keywords to produce long-tail terms e.g. cheap garden tools, cheap garden furniture, etc.

Choosing the Platform

This really is a no-brainer - it’s Wordpress all the way!

I’m not prepared to spend weeks developing a theme so I plan to scour the available, free themes all over the net and then modify one to suit my needs.

This exercise must take no more than one day so for the next 24 hours, I’ll be sorting this out.

Tomorrow, the process of creating some content for the site begins, ensuring that articles and posts contain plenty of opportunity to link out to products.

I’ll also be checking through Eric’s archives to see how best to maximise Adsense income too!