Affiliate Odyssey

Sheesh…it’s been a while.

This affiliate marketing game is so damn hard.

Since the last post, I’ve been following the Black Ink Project where updates have slowed to a crawl and I’ve also completed Ed Dale’s 30 Day Challenge.

The 30 Day Challenge was great and I learned a load of techniques for market research, keyword discovery, traffic generation, etc. but unfortunately, using a Mac, I couldn’t get any of the automated tools to work.

Market Samurai, the main tool used in the 30DC, looks awesome but it just wouldn’t work on my machine (an Adobe AIR issue). Luckily, many of the operations can be carried out manually so that’s what I did.

Key takeaways from the 30DC for me were the value of StumbleUpon for short bursts of traffic; that Squidoo is still a good idea and that Adwords is still as impenetrable as ever.

My next challenge is to try to crack landing page design - I’m just being killed by this on all of my sites and seems far harder to get right than getting clicks in Adwords.

So far, the Odyssey has been a complete failure with no money made - I am still going to see this thing through!