Free Canvas from Canvas People
By JJ Galvez | November 11, 2009
There is a company that just started their affiliate program with CJ. They put photographs on canvas, and even better they’ll send you a canvas for free! I jumped at the chance to join this program since such easy sales don’t come around too often! If you already are part of CJ you should take a look at their program:
http://members.cj.com/member/publisher/advertiserdirect.do?advertiserid=2791575
Also, don’t forget to get your free canvas now!
Topics: Free Stuff, Programs | No Comments »
December Update
By JJ Galvez | January 6, 2009
Alright so a bit late but here is the final numbers for December’s affiliate income.
CJ: $26.23
Adult Affiliate Programs: $178.32
Web Host Affiliate Programs: $47.00
Total Gain: $251.55
Total Spent: $6.06 (Adwords & Yahoo PPC)
So overall it’s been a slight gain over the previous months average, however January has been a huge gain thus far! I’ll be posting more about that in the mid-month update.
Topics: Affiliate Marketing, Goals | No Comments »
Met Art Affiliate Program – Adult Affiliate Program
By JJ Galvez | December 25, 2008
Met-Art.com is a very high quality erotica website, that needs to be said now. This includes the Met-Art Affiliate Program – it uses CCBILL as a back end so if you can’t stand a simple UI with limited tools don’t sign up. Personally if it works and I’m making money I don’t mind!
This is one of my favorite affiliate programs because of the rather high conversion ratio I’ve been getting with them! Although our adult site has a very low amount of traffic, we’re still able to convert about 5-10+ sales each month without any major effort. We spent 3-4 hours on the site last month – 0 hours on the met art section.
Last month was actually a rather good month as there was a total of 18 transactions. The total number of raw clicks (not unique!) was 51. That made the click to transaction ratio 1:4.6.
So how do I do it?
Met-Art is a niche site that has grown to have it’s own following. I identified and targeted a set of keywords which have a decent number of monthly searches and made a single post related to it. After a few weeks (once it had been spidered and ranked for those keywords) we began to receive traffic on the post and the first sale come through. It hasn’t stopped since.
So what have we learned?
1) People love their erotica.
2) Long tail keywords can make you some money with just a little research. 3) Organic traffic is beautiful!
Finally if you want to make some money…..
4) Signup for the Met-Art Affiliate Program!
Thanks for reading!
Topics: Affiliate Marketing, Information & Tutorials | No Comments »
Updates for Oct. & Nov. – LATE!
By JJ Galvez | December 19, 2008
Soo….. yeah, it’s been quite some time since I’d updated this! Busy I’ve been.
Anyhow – a very quick summary over the last two months. (Up until the end of November!)
Adult Programs: $301.24
CJ Programs: $148.23
DH Rewards: $47.00
The total income for those two months is: $496.47 not too bad.
The total expenditure for these two months is: $7.73!
I’ll say it again, I love organic traffic!
Topics: Affiliate Marketing, Goals | No Comments »
Status Post for End of Month: September
By JJ Galvez | October 1, 2008
Photo by Steve Woods
The goal for September ($100) was met and exceeded. In fact, it went well beyond what I had expected, considering the minimal amount of work I actually put into it this month; I’d estimate around 10 hours of work in total.
Income for September totals: $392.04
Expenditures for September totals: $39.56
That’s makes the ROI just over: 991%! Not bad at all, now I just need to increase these numbers! How to go about that is the question on my mind, here is what I’m currently thinking:
- I need to find a way to increase traffic to my various landing pages, without increasing overall cost too much. I’m willing to sacrifice the currently high ROI by a couple hundred percent if it means greater volume of sign ups, as that would increase the monthly bottom line.
- I need to expand the current programs I am marketing. I’m considering expanding the web hosts I am promoting. If I can analyze the payouts and conversions of various hosts I’ll know which I should be promoting. Of course any positive ROI is good, but I want to try and be frugal with advertising at the moment and build up the amount of programs which will end up giving me a positive income each month.
- Although hosting seems to be a great field to work with right now I do recognize the difficulty in it, I need to find a product with higher conversion rates and decent payouts. Anyone have any suggestions?
Problems This Month
It looks like I’m going to have to create some new content for GoDaddy, my comissions on that end seem to have dried up at the close of this month. It’s been about 14 days without a single comission on their end. I’d actually like to concentrate on their hosting instead of the SSL certs from which I’ve been collecting comissions for many months now.
Further Notes
I spent a few hours researching cost for PPC advertising on common hosting keywords. Cost can be a real killer and so far I’ve found that it is best to advertise on the longtail keywords (more about this in a post soon), in order to save money and increase ROI. Attempting to be an affiliate on a budget means I am avoiding many major keywords and, I imagine that careless use of those keywords would drop my current ROI percentage very close to nil or worse.
Topics: Affiliate Marketing, Goals | No Comments »
The Importance of Landing Pages
By JJ Galvez | September 28, 2008
I’ve been working with PPC campaigns lately, it’s been fun actually. I found that when working on these campagins I’ve spent most of my time working on two things: campagin optimization (managing cost and keywords and analyzing traffic) and the creation and optimization of landing pages.
In this post I’ll be discussing the importance of a well optimized landing page, especially in regards to it’s use in PPC campaigns. I’ll be talking about optimization of PPC Campagin Management in a future post.
So first off, what is a landing page?
In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.
Wikipedia – Landing Pages
So now we know what the general idea of a landing page is. Like the advertisement that brought them to your page, it is a call to action – you’re telling the visitor:
- Go Here!
- Buy this!
- Fill out this form.
- This is something you should buy.
- Make me some money!
Okay, well you can think that last one, but that’s basically the idea. Simple right? Kinda… not really. It’s easy to throw up a landing page and buy some traffic for it, you’ll get people going to the page, but will they perform the action that is going to earn you some greenbacks?
Creating a Landing Page
From reading, creating, and experimenting with landing pages I’ve learned that there are basically two major schools of thought.
A page promotes multiple offers and gives access to related products
I can see the first of these being very useful when you have access to a product catalog and are not promoting a single product. For example, when promoting for a jewelry store you might want to create a landing page for high quality diamond rings. In this situation you might not want to feature a single ring, instead you might be much more interested in featuring the top 5 selling diamond rings, maybe even a section for the company’s current specials. Another good way of doing this is making a very visually attractive page link to the different related sections of your site. Blue Nile has a great landing page setup for engagement rings.
Personally I would get a little crazy on this, create a small system capable of pulling in the jeweler’s catalog, creating a database that is queried based on keywords, then create PPC campaigns with dynamic keyword inserts, and BOOM you could have a dynamic landing page whose content is generated based on what the user is searching for, oh targeting is indeed quite sweet.
Create a page that promotes a single offer
I like this one, it’s so much faster! As far as I’ve seen in my own results these type of landing pages are also more effective; this of course conversions will depend on many different variables – anything from the type of product you’re selling to the type of customer the company targets. Anyhow, pages like these are quite common and am example of a landing page I setup for a hosting advertisement (dreamhost promo) can be found by clicking that link.
These type of pages are quick and easy to get up and running. Optimizing these pages is the real trick you’ll need to learn.
Optimizing the Page – What I’ve Learned So Far
- Make sure the page loads quickly – they just clicked an add and expect to see what they are looking for… NOW!
- Keep the graphics to a minimum – don’t flood their browser with a ton of images! Brings down load time and it can quickly turn away some people
- Don’t be too minimalist! The page needs to look clean but NOT EMPTY! I can not stress this enough – if the page looks empty you’re going to have the visitor leave right away.
- Use some color! It helps, I went through various versions of my dreamhost coupon code page, turns out the color pages had longer overall visits and a higher click through rate, up to over 20% on the one I’ve been linking.
- Give them a way to get to the product without too much fuss! You’ll notice from the blue nile link – they offer various links to their products all about, they don’t hide it or make you scroll about. On my own landing page for DH I added a banner as a call to action! CLICK HERE! SIGNUP!
A Final Tip
When it comes to creating and editing these pages I recommend having some sort of CMS. If you have any sort of CMS, you’ll be able to integrate your site, landing pages, stat systems, and pretty much anything you’d like through the system – or even through blogging systems like WordPress if you set it up properly. In the case of this blog and my landing pages I use WordPress. I do recommend having something that is capable of tracking changes, easily linking in your stat systems, and keeps everything organized – find something you like and can work with – it’s worth the time to setup and learn.
If anyone is interested and needs someone to install and setup WordPress for the creation of landing pages let me know I’m happy to help out for a reasonable fee. Also, if you made it all the way down here, leave me a comment and let me know what you think, if you have any questions do the same!
Topics: Information & Tutorials | No Comments »
The Mid-Month Update for September
By JJ Galvez | September 13, 2008
Hey everyone! First things first;
The Affiliate Marketing Update
Well things have actually been going quite a bit better then planned. Although I haven’t really done much for it the overall earnings for this month have already exceeded my $100 goal! We started the month off nicely with CJ (GoDaddy) and CCBill (MetArt) giving us over $40 to start with in the first few days of the month the bulk of this month’s earnings (thus far!) have come from DreamHost’s rewards program with 3 signups so far we’re looking at $141. Coincidentally, this blog is actually hosted with DreamHost so really I’m actually promoting something I use!
A Personal Update
I have to let you all know that although I have been trying to make time for the study and execution of affiliate marketing I’ve been finding it difficult. My life has me swamped! For those of you who don’t know me personally, I have a full time job, still have a few clients on the side from when I was doing development work, and a few others who have been knocking at my door to see if I’m available to stretch myself out just a little more to work on their projects!
Overall, it’s just been crazy! Still I think I’ve done a pretty decent job of managing my time, and thanks to my wife things at home have remained steady, difficult at times, but steady.
Thanks for reading to update! More to come soon.
Topics: Affiliate Marketing, Goals | No Comments »
My Goals for September
By JJ Galvez | September 10, 2008
We’re already part way into this month and I haven’t gathered much in the way of affiliate commissions. Currently we’re looking at $10.95 from CJ.com, another $30 from CCBill. So since I’m going to be spending most of my time really trying to learn about different techniques, settings up software, writing some customizations, and well working my normal job the goal for this month will be set low.
Goal for affiliate earnings: $100.00
Nothing spectacular, in fact kind of low – I’m going to try and get myself together for October, where I intend to set the goal at $500.
Let’s see how it goes!
Topics: Goals | No Comments »
Why I’m An (Amateur) Affiliate Marketer & My Goals
By JJ Galvez | September 9, 2008
A Little About Me!
First a little about me; I’m 23 years old, married, I have two children. I have worked in tech support, as a programmer, consultant, systems analyst; and for awhile ran my own business. I’m eclectic and new things draw my attention. I’m happy.
My family drives me; because of them I set goals which lead to material comfort and success. I feel a need to push myself towards these goals with absolute determination.
I believe in (and try to instill in my children) a mindset which values hard work, intelligence, wisdom, and the appreciation of everything a person earns to the highest possible degree. I believe that material comforts give greater opportunity of growth for the other portions of human life. Basically, when a person is comfortable with the life around them, they may find it easier to further both their intellectual and spiritual aspects.
Why Affiliate Marketing?
I find the idea fascinating. It’s basically getting paid a commission to sell a product and/or service for another company. Sometimes, you’ll even find companies who will pay you per lead, not a sale, just a lead!
“So it’s sales” you might say. Yes, basically it is, with two HUGE buts… You aren’t limited to how much you can make, or the products you sell!
Affiliate marketing can be done for pretty much any product or service you can think of; from adult website memberships, to movie rental services, to home loans, even retail stores.
That alone gives YOU and ME a greater chance of success, if you want to start as an affiliate marketer and don’t know what to start with, you’ll probably be able to find a company that sells something you’re familiar with.
How Much Will I Earn?
Honestly, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. There are affiliate marketers who make well over a hundred thousand dollars a month; there are countless others who make pretty much nothing.
From affiliate programs which I have found a small niche in I’ll make between 30 to 60 dollars a month per program. On the high end I’ll only earn about two, maybe three hundred dollars in a month.
I don’t advertise, I don’t push any of my programs, everything comes in from organic traffic on blog posts I made many months ago, and I continue to get paid. I haven’t even been actively posting different programs. I’ve been pretty content with things until now.
Now, I want to really start as an affiliate marketer. While I do it I’m going to post about my progress, any wins or losses; what works for me and what doesn’t.
I’m going to be as transparent as I possibly can. That, for those of you who are interested in taking the same steps as I am, in the places I’ll stumble and fall you may be able to keep away from.
Wish me luck.
Topics: About Me, Affiliate Marketing | No Comments »