Affiliate Musketeer

Like most people who intend to dabble in affiliate marketing, for one reason or other I found my way into the clickbank fold.  It sounds so promising, doesn’t it?  Products that convert extremely well and pay $45 per sale! Whao…it HAS to be a winner.  So many people out there selling you stories of ‘how I did it’ using clickbank products and to be totally honest, the bumf works because before you know it you’ve hoplinked through a few sites and seriously considered buying a few tools to help you make your first clickbank million.

By the time you’ve read all these guides and tips and tricks and then seen how easy it is to make money online you’re totally sold and you throw yourself into that affiliate buzz frenzy when you’re just so certain that THIS TIME, more than any other time before, you’re going to take it seriously, dedicate time to the task and make some serious wonga.  With that motivational button pressed on in your head you spend a couple of hours going through clickbank products and finally find a winner…

Xbox 360 Fixes…ahh, that sounds like fun.  Gosh look at all the money this pays out! Wow, there must be a billion xbox consoles in the world and probably 50% have the ‘red light problem’.  ‘This’ll be the one, I’ll make my money out of this’, you tell yourself.  So, armed with this foolproof plan you put together a site in one [long] night.  Probably something like this one.  Once you’re confident you have your site up and running, you start to worry about traffic and where to get it from.  You visit a few forums or remember what you’ve read before and come up with a list:

1. PPC – Google, Bing or Yahoo – but you’ll probably only consider google because you dont know anything about the other two.
2. Article marketing – wow, cool.  Ill write some articles about xbox fixes that’ll go on massive PR6 websites and I’ll get some really targeted traffic because the articles will show up high in the SERPS.
3. Social Bookmarking – I’ll open up a twitter account, squidoo account and set up a hubpage and that’ll do the trick
4. SEO – yeah, I know it’ll take me time but by the time all my articles that I write get indexed and my social sites get found it shouldn’t take me that long to start showing up in SERPs. Ill have to buy a few links too but I’ll get there…yeah, right…

Whilst you’re in your crazy phase (and to finish off the night), you decide to write one article and submit it to ezinearticles just to get you going and set up for the rest of the week…maybe tomorrow you’ll set up a PPC account with Google AdWords and then you’ll start to make some serious money and be on your gravy train to island paradise.

WRONG!!

The reality of the matter is that before you know it you’ll have made no money and be so bored with the whole thing that it will eventually fizzle out and die and be cast aside to the growing pile of get rich quick schemes you’ve tried over the last 6 months – then you’ll see something else and do it all over again

Stop the Vicious Circle

I can only speak for myself when I write my posts although I do concede, most of this post has been written in a very generalized and presumptious way.  The point is, everything I wrote here has happened to me and I’m pretty sure if its happened to me it’ll have happened to you too.  It took me quite a while to get to grips with all the stories out there and all the ideas but one thing that I’ve found that is absolutely vital to my own earnings is that whatever hairbrained plan I come up with, it has to actually interest me or else I get sooo bored with it that I just fall away from my plan.

This has happened to me on several clickbank products, namely the Xbox 360 Red Light Fix, the ‘Rocket languages’ products (check out my shitty site here) and of course, ‘Make Your Own Solar Power’.

Truth be told, all of these products interest me about as much as a boil on my battlesack (probably less in actual fact), and this proved to be a factor which contributed to me making practically no money from all of these sites.  Although I did actually make about $90 from the xbox site but that’s beside the point.  It didn’t make enough money fast enough and it didnt interest me enough to stick with it and see the program through its slow phases.

Since then I’ve actually created a few other sites that I might share with you one day based around some of my own interests and I have to say, the difference in my own motivation has been immeasurable and as a result, my earnings have increased substantially and I actually do feel that there is a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.