Goal Update: Make Money Online, Week 1
A quick update on my goal to make money online…
Haven’t made anything yet. I’m hoping to report something very different by next week.
For now, I’m going with the affiliate marketing approach. This is where I sell other people’s products for a share of the profits. I’ll be selling both digital and physical products.
This can be a very shady business. This is because most people are interested in only making the sale, and not actually helping anyone in the process. For this reason, not many people who sell the product actually buy it or know anything about it.
I am strictly planning on buying every product — digital or physical — that I promote. I’ll be focusing, mostly, on reviewing the products and trying to get good rankings in Google for each review. A rarity in the world of affiliate promotions is honesty and integrity, so I’m hoping that I can set myself apart.
The idea is that people search for reviews on products since they’re already interested in buying, and will run across my web page in the process and hopefully decide to buy at that point.
My current experiment: to see if video reviews or written reviews with screen grabs are better. I should have my first full video review up tonight, and I’ll report back within a week or two how it’s performing.
Again, the immediate goal is only $1,000 a month in profits. If I were to promote higher-end products — software packages that pay out $80 or more in commissions — then I would only need a few sales every month.
Stay tuned for more updates soon.
April 22nd, 2009 at 6:11 am
In my experience info products are usually scammy. Physical products usually aren’t. That’s not hard and fast, but generally true. You know those pants you were raving about. That’s a perfect affiliate product for you. You can sell it because you believe in it and proved it to your readers. You need to set up a section for the products you use on your travels. You need to link back to posts about those pants. Those are a natural to a blog like this. The number one thing you need is traffic and I bet you can get traffic to this blog faster and cheaper than a generic affiliate site. Those links to American Apparel and Backcountry need to be aff links.
I know Back Country is on Commission Junction, not sure about American Apparel though. Amazon has a good aff program and there is a plugin for wordpress to turn any Amazon link into your aff link.
April 22nd, 2009 at 6:15 am
I found your blog through a comment on another site. You can easily pick up readers by commenting on related blogs.
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Yeah, most information products are junk. That’s why I’m going to be weeding through them to find the few golden nuggets, then actually buy them, and then review them honestly. No one else does this, so I’m going to see if there’s any success to be had in that route.
But, again, I’m also going to work with physical products. Something like Amazon.com’s marketplace is promising if I can find a way to promote higher-ticket items, like computers. I think the max payout on those is about $25 each, but it’s worth experimenting with.
I’m wary of using my blog to make money just yet. I’ll post affiliate links on here some day if it’s for a product I really believe in, but for now, I want to focus on writing good content.