Here’s a tip for all the newbies out there. Don’t ever pay for an E-book promising to help make you thousands of dollars by exploiting the secrets of millionaire internet marketers. If you read an E-book title along those lines then you can immediately pass it off as a rip-off. All you will get in these e-books is regurgitated crap and nothing you can’t find on the internet for free anyways.

One webmaster got sick of all the e-books. Jon, the owner of Wicked Fire, created a thread in his forum specifically for giving away all these treasured e-books for free. It’s his way of protesting to the people who help ruin the internet. Jon has received death threats and emails threatening to sue him over this list of free e-books. You can find gems like Duvet Dollars, Day Job Killer, and Google Money Pro. Odds are if you’re looking at buying a “make money online” e-book, you will find it for free in this forum thread. There are currently 37 pages dedicated to providing people with the e-books for free.

I’m not saying ALL e-books are crap, but 95% of them are, especially the ones that try to make you pay for it. Now, you will have to be a member of Wicked Fire in order to get the e-books, but that shouldn’t stop you… registration is free and open to the public. I hope by reading this, I’ve helped save you money!

I’ve tried my best to avoid talking about Market Leverage over the past month or so. It seems like every big time blogger has been promoting the crap out of them. Market Leverage hit the scene by giving out dozens of prizes on blogs through contests. I was skeptical at first… I always am, but eventually I took the bait and signed up with them.

I actually signed up through Tyler Cruz, determined to win one of the prizes he was giving out. I was eying that $200 AMEX card, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be. I started very strong in the first week or so of the contest, but then everyone caught up and eventually passed me on the top 4 rankings. Some people are very good affiliate marketers and have earned way more then I can. I guess the contest is still going, but at this point, I can’t win a prize. I’m too far behind.

Since joining, I’ve actually been doing quite well. I’ve always been able to make some money here and there from Azoogle, but since the switch to Market Leverage, I’ve notice a nice increase. Check out my stats from June 11 through June 30.

I was able to rack in $301.05 in a very short amount of time. And you know what’s sweet about that? The $301.05 you see is all profit. I don’t spend any money on PPC like Adwords or Yahoo Search. Everything I make from affiliate marketing is from SEO and driving traffic to my websites organically. So you’ll see people in Tyler’s contest who have $500 or $900+, but you have no idea how much money it took them to make that $900. Maybe the dude spent $800 on adwords? We don’t know. So the contest is actually flawed. It’s based on revenue instead of net income.

I’m going to continue to use Market Leverage until I start to see a drop off in earnings, then I may go back to Azoogle. But so far, ML has been great and my affiliate manager has been awesome. If you haven’t signed up with them yet, then I suggest you do. I just signed up my buddy from Political Blog yesterday and he’s already converted 4 leads for cold hard cash from natural traffic. No paid PPC. Here’s my signup link if you want it.

February was a pretty down month for me when it comes to affiliate marketing. What that basically means is I didn’t do much of anything. I don’t think I ran any new campaigns. I didn’t read up on anything. Didn’t learn any new tricks or test any new keywords. Even though I just sat there in February, I still wanted to share with you guys my earnings from all the affiliate companies. Since I didn’t do any ppc campaigns, all these earnings just come randomly from the sites I already own.

My January affiliate marketing results showed I made $144 in profit in all my affiliate marketing accounts. My goal for February was about $250-300.

February Affiliate Earnings
Azoogle - $140
CPA Empire - $2.50
RocketProfit - $10
Neverblue Ads - $13.70

Total - $166.20

So my profit from January to February went up $20. Sure I didn’t reach my goal, but at least my affiliate earnings didn’t go down. It’s sad to say that I think March (and April for that matter) will be the same as February. I just do not have the time right now to work on affiliate campaigns. It takes a ton of time to research keywords and set up profitable campaigns. Until my wedding is over and I’m settled in, I just won’t the have time to commit to it. So I’ll be stuck earning just $100-200/month from my sites just sitting there.

I’m definitely not giving up on affiliate marketing though. I just have to delay how dedicated I can be to it for a few months. I’ll continue to post my monthly reports though.

So I figured I would share some of my affiliate marketing earnings with you guys so it will help motivate me to succeed and improve every month. For the month of January I made $86 in CPA Empire, $34 in Neverblue Ads, and $116 in Azoogle. Sounds pretty good for the first month, right?

Now keep in mind that not all of that money was earning through PPC campaigns. If you head over to some of my websites like Gator Envy or Pimp Myspace, you will see I have affiliate links on there. Gator Envy has a link in several locations for ringtones and Pimp Myspace has several links for stuff like webfetti and zwinkies. Since I’m not paying to drive traffic to those sites I kind of feel like the money I get from them is free.

All in all, I spent $64.17 (really only like $39 because I had a $25 free coupon) in Yahoo Search Marketing and $27.49 in Google Adwords. That’s a total of about $91.66 ($66.50 of my own money) spent on PPC campaigns.

As you all know, I pretty much lost money in all my campaigns. The first campaign I ran for zip submit leads was the most successful of them all. That’s where the bulk of the $86 in CPA Empire came from.

So far in February I’ve been pretty quiet with PPC. I’ve paused all my campaigns (because they didn’t work). I will relaunch one of my earlier campaigns on Thursday this week and start a brand new one that day as well. I just wanted to take some time off to gather myself and review my campaigns/landing pages to find out what was going wrong.

So if I made $144 in profit in all my affiliate marketing accounts (remember a lot of that money comes naturally from some of my websites), I guess my goal for February should be about $250-300. If I can tack on an extra $200 or so every month then I’ll be near $2000 per month by the end of December. I’m already 4 days into February now with only $9 in my affiliate accounts (thanks to a ringtone lead in Neverblue). So I’ve definitely got some work to do.

I’m coming off another week of affiliate marketing, with another failed campaign. I ended up losing money again. Now I know a lot of people will say to be prepared to lose money in the beginning, and I am to an extent, but at some point you have to pull the plug. I probably spent about $20-30 this week in Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Ya that’s not a lot of money, but for someone who is just testing things out, you can get a good number of clicks for $25 and at least get an idea if your campaign will work. With that $25 I got probably about 50-60 or so clicks (this niche was more expensive then the previous zip submit ones I did). Out of those 55 clicks, only 1 freaking person converted to a lead. DAMN that sucks.

So when people aren’t converting there could be several things wrong.

• Your landing page sucks
• Your ads suck
• The offer sucks
• Your keywords suck

Now, I put quite a bit of time into this campaign. I designed a badass (in my opinion) landing page that was almost identical to the offer’s landing page. If made awesome ads and picked really targeted keywords (Google even gave a lot of my keywords Great and Good quality score… something I didn’t get on my last campaigns). The only thing this leaves is the offer sucking. But really I don’t think the offer sucks either. So I’m at a complete loss as to why I can’t make money from this campaign.

Why Affiliate Marketing Sucks

Because no one will freaking tell you anything! Affiliate marketing is so different then any other make money online method. It is very secretive, if someone finds a good campaign they’ll never tell you and will do everything in their power to throw you off track. People on Wicked Fire forums aren’t helpful either. If you ask for help, half the people call you a newb and just say that you suck to bad.

So why am I still trying? Because Making money from Adsense SUCKS! I’m so sick of watching my earnings drop every single day and I’m sick of getting like 2 cents a click. It’s not worth it. If I had sites that I could line up private advertisers, I would… but I don’t so I’m stuck with the shitty alternative. I’ve got to keep trying though, and keep failing or else I’ll never get anywhere. Like I said, people in affiliate marketing aren’t helpful and won’t show you step by step how to succeed. The only way to succeed is to do it on your own.

It’s been a couple more days since I last posted about my first “true” affiliate marketing attempt. While I don’t consider it a total failure (because it did make me profit on 2 of the days), I don’t consider this first attempt successful. I ended up about even in the money because I stopped my ppc campaigns before I lost too much. It was an overall good experience though. I’m sure not many people start successful campaigns on their first try. If I’ve learned anything about affiliate marketing its ‘Test, Test and Test Again!’

After doing some research, I determined my landing page pretty much sucked. Not only that, but I was targeting an audience that really wouldn’t be interested in my offer. My target audience was probably 40-50 year old intelligent men/women, yet I was trying to get them to complete zip submit offers for a $500 gift card? Come on David! What was I thinking?

First of all, if you’re going to try and get people to fill out zip submits for free gift cards and other crap, you need to target a generally dumb audience. Let’s face it, how many of you would fill out a zip submit and actually think you’re going to win the prize? I was targeting old people. They probably think by giving out a zip code someone will steal their identity. Old people are way too cautious.

So I’ve got like $35 left in my YSM account and need to figure out what to do on my next affiliate marketing attempt. I’ve pretty much axed the zip/email submits. I’d like to try something more genuine. I don’t want to say dating/insurance because those markets are sooo freaking saturated, but I’ll definitely look at something paying a bit more the $1.50 per lead. I’m also going to revamp the way I build my landing pages. I’m not a designer, so it’s hard for me to come up with graphic designs that appeal to visitors. Worst comes to Worst, I’ll have to buy a custom landing page for $45 or something.