5 Affiliate Trials And Errors To Use For Testing

Through affiliate marketing I have found many sources of information online, but for the most part the information that I have found and read only describes one half of the solution because the other half is actually taking action by trial and error to see what works well and what needs to be thrown out.

Today I would like to go through 5 trials that any affiliate should be doing in their affiliate business and by trials I mean affiliates taking action and doing things to a plan, then I will follow these 5 with 5 errors that you as a performance marketer should be avoiding altogether.

5 trials of an affiliate

1. Test ad networks for good ad click throughs and metrics, Adsense, Kontera, try links within content, ad placements on targeted websites, check the stats for the keywords for context links so they are super relevant. It takes a lot of work to test and track, but as an affiliate you should get used to this way of analyzing the stats to your advantage, but don't over obsess with your stats.

2. Split test different opt in forms if you have them on your website, you could have one static sign up form and one pop up or pop under form, see which one converts to more subscribers after a couple of weeks, then choose the best one, simple as!
Testing out different formats is what trial and error is for in the world of any affiliate business or other online business type, so use the power of tested results to further your earnings, visitors and click throughs.

3. Always try to evaluate your affiliate marketing plan to see if you are headed in the right direction or if you need to improve in some areas, do this once a month to measure results that you track anyway.
Ask for feedback from your visitors, reades of your blog, or emails, the more problems you help people overcome, the more you'll be able to plan stuff ahead to present to your customer base for each affiliate merchant promotion.

4. When starting out on a potential affiliate campaign, test your promotions and content on a free blog for a whole month and track all results that occur, this way no money is lost and it places a safety net around your bank balance, if there are no strong conversions after a month or so, either you could decide to keep it and try harder or move on to something else.

5. See what other people in the affiliate marketing world are up to and replicate their success, use bits and pieces from each of their strategies that they use, maybe they have certain promotions and ways of promoting that are an expertise for them, try what they do and see what happens.
You'll often find other top people in the affiliate niche, because they have blogs that have lots of readers, so snoop around and find out some new stuff, you never know you might hit on something you have not tried yet.

So really trial and error is just something that should be done on all levels, anything that can be tried and tested avoids the errors later on...

Landing page optimization is equally important so go and find out about this essential book resource on the subject of landing page optimizations and fine tuning of your website

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Stressed With Affiliate Marketing? 5 Simple Ways To Beat It

Image by HRW Worcester


Ever get stressed with affiliate marketing?

Just chill out for gods sake!

Being an affiliate is easy, but earning through it takes time, just like a proper business and not some over night rich quick set up.

Stress becomes a part of any life situation and it's how you handle it that matters, frustration becomes stress at some point and stress leads to all sorts of ill health and lack of motivation in your affiliate business.

Stress from affiliate marketing can manifest in many ways and some ways to overcome these are simple ones, hey it could help!!

1. Do anything but affiliate promotions or online stuff, go and draw, paint, do whatever you do offline to relax, this will help you in may ways to become refreshed to come back an hour, a day or even a week later.

2. Instead of trying the tried and tested ways of affiliate marketing, which you should not abandon, try something wacky or off the wall, original and in a totally different direction to other affiliates, changing track could be just what your bank balance ordered.

3. Keep things organized and in their place. I know this sounds obvious, but there were countless times when I first started out, looking for bits of paper with user names and passwords and getting myself all worked up because I couldn't find them. Instead write all of your usernames in a small notebook, or even better on an encrypted file on disk or your computer.

4. A good way of dealing with stress in your online business is having something to punch, and no not a close by employee (Although if they are annoying I wouldn't blame you!) I recently got a brand new punch bag and I hang it up outside my office space, so when I feel like a bit of one on one with the old bag, I ask the wife (no just kidding!)

5. Perhaps the best one out of the lot is just keep learning about affiliate marketing, learning new things takes time sure but the satisfaction of getting things right from the trial and error aspects of the affiliate marketing way just gives your confidence a boost. I know I still have a few things to learn about the more technical parts of say data feeds and things like that, but I know full well that if I do a bit of research and actually follow through on that study with action I would have worked it out and I'd feel quite chuffed.

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An Affiliate Book Review: Make A Fortune Promoting Other Peoples Stuff Online By Rosalind Gardner

One of the latest books for affiliate marketing I bought recently was "Make A Fortune Promoting Other Peoples Stuff Online By Rosalind Gardner" it gives some very practical tips on how to maximize your affiliate promotions in the best way possible, this book gives detailed hands on experience from yet another affiliate marketer who obviously knows her stuff, but what is particularly neat about her book is that she goes through a few things that more than likely just get ignored like the preparation of all of your affiliate promotions, all the details and the use of spreadsheets to hold all of that important data.

Another thing I liked about the book it gave some meaning to affiliate terms that also get left out alot from other affiliate marketers, like product data feeds which was nice for potential super affiliates to read about and to know what they are and how they could be used as an affiliate.

While the book could not cover everything completely in detail, the book left an impression upon me with it's information that I mainly knew, but I like to read other affiliates way of working and see what works for others so it might work for me type too, through this book I learned a few things that I've either avoided or just was plain ignorant to and that is keeping your self organized as an affiliate promoter, because there are separate volumes of data to be analyzed and measured, such as keyword analytics,traffic stats,supply and demand and any other factors that go towards a successful referral business.

Although perhaps this book though may be a lead in to Rosalind's other Book, "The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People's Stuff Online"
, because I felt that it held back on some aspects of affiliate marketing to be collected in the handbook, all in all though it was a good read though and it inspired me further to stick with it and learn more from affiliates like Rosalind Gardner.

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Affiliate Programs: Quality Over Quantity

At first when I started to write this post, I came to the conclusion that quality over quantity is far better to have happen to your affiliate business, but then I started to think about the growth potential of an affiliate business and now I am quite decided that this is the case to build a solid foundation early on, then as time goes on a mixture of quality and quantity must be applied in equal measures.

You see, once you have one affiliate blog or website set up, then the quantity aspect should kick in in your affiliate plan with more tangible income streams, no matter how large or small, they all add up, quality informational content and varying quantities of it make a good start for an affiliate empire.

The rates of commissions you get paid should not all be high either

, a mix of high and low paying commission rates work well as does the fact of negotiating a higher rate if you can prove you can drive more traffic to the affiliated businesses website.

By looking out for increased affiliate rates by how much you refer, you are able to leverage your own ability to generate affiliate sales. Amazons affiliate rate is 4% and if you sell more than 6 items within one calendar month, your referral rate increases to 6%, this is especially good on content rich and traffic heavy sites. A good example would be the Problogger blog, Darren Rowse who runs it, makes his 6% referral rate every month due to his huge volumes of traffic.

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Make Money From Allposters.com Affiliate Sales

One of my better affiliate earners - Make some extra $$$

The AllPosters.com Affiliates Program is a great way to make money with your website. All you have to do is place referral links on your site to AllPosters.com. When your site visitors click on your links and make purchases at the poster store, you earn 25%-30% of the sale.

This is one of my rising earners as I am currently testing the nature of image search through the search engines and it is shaping up quite nicely as my click through rate is increasing, now what I am concentrating more on now is converting them click throughs into sales, this is done with a handful of articles, numerous ads on free classifieds, targeted blog posts and a bit of clever social networking, yes it takes a lot of effort but at the end of it all, there are lessons to be learned.

I am measuring the stats of my many squidoo lenses, hub pages and blogs, although Allposters affiliate links are only a small percentage of my image affiliate promotions they are getting quite a bit more traffic than others, I suppose the second best image affiliate is Shareapic as this is also driving targeted traffic to my blogs and specialized web pages.

Sign up to the affiliate program today!

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Take A Break From Affiliate Marketing Sometimes

When all is stressed in the affiliate empire, take a breather and do something else, often is the case that 30 minutes to an hour can help rejuvenate or just refresh your mind to come back to it later.

Sometimes you need to be reminded that a rest or a change of activity can help you relax and at the same time stay focused on your main tasks in your day, whether it may be a bit of sex (if you can get it??!! shake hands with the unemployed then!)or a walk in the park or both , hahaha! whatever the case you decide to do to take a break, the main reason you do this is to keep your affiliate marketing business ticking over, because the more you think about your business and have no time for yourself to think about other things then what's the point of trapping yourself in your own business if there is no you or family time.

So chill out a bit, because I sure am and I'm more focused and looking forward to the future because of it.

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Affiliate Niche Promotion Ideas For Earning

Whatever you need to promote online with affiliate marketing you really need a good niche, like a good pair of smelly boots a niche can be quite useful to attract people(smelly boots?)

Ideas for an affiliate niche to be selected could be the ones that are in large general niches such as health, business, entertainment, design, travel and then go deep into these huge niches and find some little known but quality affiliate programs that will build in terms of earning potential and value for your referrers and your own earnings.

Lets look at health affiliate programs, the popular ones seem to be health drinks, berry drinks for this and that, I see them everywhere, so to target that area with an affiliate promotion would take a lot of work to compete with all the other larger companies who have super affiliates already in place, instead finding a little known health drink or a new one would be ideal for your promotions to be sustainable in growth.

I myself have never ever promoted health products as yet, but there may come a time when I just might, so I'd probably go for a health product that is relatively new or has not been promoted to death by large companies or health and wellness corporations. And part of my marketing plan would include an adwords campaign too as that would drive the traffic that much more quicker to the promotions.

More and more professional affiliate marketers will tell you that you should be promoting an affiliate program based solely around your interests and that is what is important, to start with an area you are familiar with and work from there, also by creating value around sub topics of the main interest that you are really into, you can build up sub niche topics with valuable information that is useful for your customers.

Experience dictates a lot of the online decisions you make, because without any experience in a certain area then you might just create content that is poor in terms of not fully being researched properly.

Some other ideas for a niche affiliate promotion are:

Magazines - these are great because there are magazines for almost all kinds of topics for hobbies, health and fitness, business and many other niches, just take a look at your local book store or newstand for the specialist magazines, this will give you lots of ideas and actually pin pointing a magazine subscription to locate and promote.

Around your house - Eh??! you heard, everyone buys something that they like a book, a dvd, software, laptop, whatever the case, you can find most of your favourite products in an affiliate program, promotions work best when you own the product and have used it, therefore you can recommend it based on your own personal use, why it is good, why you bought it, write reviews all over the internet and provide this useful information. Internet customers actually read reviews to the product to gain more info before they buy, I know I do on Amazon.com.

Search online - Searching online for specific ideas does work best when you have a good idea on what you want to promote in the first place, searching the affiliate networks or affiliate directoriesis a good place to start, but also typing in a specific phrase and then affiliate program after it may come up with more direct results.

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Making Money Online Through A Single Idea

Image by Alexey05

Making money online requires a single idea at first, one cracking idea that is based on your main interests or hobby, this is the best way of motivating yourself to actually make money with something that you hold an interest in is much more valuable to you. If you like to dress up in womens clothes then why not create an idea around that, research a niche for transvestites, find where they hang out, what problems they face, make up tips for men dressing as women, that is only an example by the way, I'm not saying do this if you are against this type of thing, but sub niches are based on real life situations of what certain people go through or are gravitated towards, So why not try to cash in on it and have some fun in the areas that make you smile and be happy.

A good example is of mine, I really have a strong interest in drawing fantasy art and monsters, this type of thing could be made into a money making small venture and it is something I have in the pipeline, drawing relaxes me, so if it has that effect for me others will to, try and create angles and benefits for your intended area or expertise, ask yourself what would help others who like what you do?

Finding demand for the information you intend to create can be done by surveying your visitors or those that you interact with in your niche area, forums are the best place to find out problem statements of this nature, this way you are finding out solid information that will shape your business in an affiliate capacity or as an online business. Solutions and the needs of the masses can be fulfilled in almost any business area, so seek out anyone who needs a solution and get to know them better through some good old fashioned communication.

While technical aspects need to be found out about in all honesty as you can't get by online by just an ignorance of web technology, optimized content that is search engine friendly and seo(Search Engine Optimization) techniques really help with your online business for your site to get found and searched thoroughly and also the optimization of each page must be taken into account, because not everyone is going to find you through your home page, so spend sometime on your other pages with good keyword variations that compliment your main keywords.

Back to your money making idea, the one thing that you must provide is value above all else, if you don't have that, you don't have much. So by making your idea focused around a passionate topic or of subject matter you can really get your teeth into, you can bring something enthusiastic to the table and build something solid from there. By giving something for your visitors to do on your website, whether that is subscribing or signing up to your list, buying a product, clicking a link, calls to action are important on any site, because this makes your site interactive and hopefully more popular.

Making money online has several advantages that off line businesses don't get, for one you can start up with low capital and start straight away without having to wait for anything to materialize you just get on with it online, write content now and publish it later, upload pictures, get a web host account with domain name which are fairly inexpensive, like any business a marketing plan is involved but the readiness to start now is far better than a brick and mortar business were you have to wait for loans to be paid to you and the funds to become available and premises to secure.

A single online business idea can be worked out online actually as you are building it, from scratch, from the beginning, cause and effect, writing in your notepad then transferring your content to your site and designing it or getting someone else to, the best thing about starting an internet business is it's quite a quick process, one that takes minimal planning but also long term commitment, a good idea builds over time and the entrepreneur within you is more willing to take risks and experiment with web technology such as web 2.0 and affiliate marketing.

So once you have an idea, don't let it stew, let it out, show it to the world, see what people think, build on it and just try instead of not doing anything remotely unique and interesting, you yourself have a unique take on the world and something to give, so show it to the world!

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Ad Revenue Run Down Of The More Popular Earners

Ad revenue is another important income stream that many affiliate marketers use on their websites to add to their internet income, advertising is a really targeted stream of income for anyone who has a website, although it's not for everyone.

But if you're curious about trying any of these then just take a look and try them out.

Adsense

Widgetbucks

Kontera

Amazon Content Links

Netklix

Some I'm more experienced at using because I've tested them out on other blogs and websites. The best thing to do is test and trial all the ways you could possible feature and optimize these sorts of ads, play around with the positioning of them on your site and just generally experiment with everything to do with your ads customization and other settings.

Content links work quite well within your sites content as deep links that are anchored towards relevant information on your site.

Other one that I have not tried out yet is Chitika but I eventually will try this one out and I just might have a blog in mind to trial it out soon.

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Are You A Super Affiliate?

Well are you?

Somewhere in time I bet you want to be, like the rest of us who do affiliate marketing to supplement our normal jobs income we want to build up a level of income that beats any other time wasting real life employment where we work for our money instead of working when we want taking control of our financial and spare time.

Super Affiliates are those special people who are able to promote anything, like selling glasses to a blind man, they have that skill, which is a collection of skills, all these talents come under lots of skill categories such as seo, marketing, writing and other optimized tests of conversions. But the ultimate factor is they make sales regularly an build up multiple streams of income.

Building your super affiliate pathway is beyond the scope of just technical skills, but is more on a par with the entrepreneurs spirit one that involves taking informed risks and doing something each day in marketing and promotions. Having a hand in all the available affiliate campaigns that you are comfortable with is the way to go.

Starting out in affiliate marketing, then this quick video might be for you by Shawn Collins a prolific super affiliate who has a top notch blog, in this video he goes through how he would start in affiliate marketing today - Watch it now if you are a new affiliate!

Learn from those super affiliates that are earning is the only way you can be a super affiliate.

The Super Affiliate Handbook: How Rosalind Gardner Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People's Stuff Online

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Building Up An Affiliate Profile Page On Amazon

Amazon has a top promotional method and way of letting people know about you in some subtle little ways, again this is dependent on what you know and what you can demonstrate to use to your advantage with the Amazon associate program combined with these great methods.

Building wish lists can benefit your credibility

But by combining relevant wish lists with relevant reviews you are setting yourself up for some genuine and powerful recommendations yourself, just take a look at some of the most popular products sold on Amazon, typically they have far more reviews than normal product items and reviews often get read because people want to know what other buyers of the product thought of it and quite often more information is spilled about the product in the review process.

I took the chance of creating a quick wish list here of affiliate related books that I just might purchase soon for Christmas or even before - Affiliate Book Amazon Wish List Then when I eventually do buy the books I write very detailed reviews at the available space at the end of product description and the top tip here is to add a little bit more information here than you would normally, this creates a solid recommendation and builds your credibility up and did I mention you should create your Amazon profile and direct it to your main area of expertise - which is your website or blog!

The amount of views and traffic that comes from your profile and reviews if you link your amazon promotions up right through your associate built up links equals affiliate income.

Though this method again does require a concerted effort and a good knowledge and interest for the subject matter at hand.

See an example of my Amazon profile here

Are Amazon affiliate marketing books really any good?

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Junk The Junk Affiliates Start With The Good Affiliates

It comes a time within your affiliate journey that you just might need to get rid of some of the programs that aren't converting well in your affiliate marketing plan, I call this quite simply - Junk the crap!.

As an affiliate starter we try and join just about every program there is and we get overwhelmed by the prospect of promoting them all at once, I know I've been there, quite often the best thing a new affiliate could do is start one program at a time, make it successful, then let it run itself and then move on to the next.

But this is a process that must be broken down into easily managed steps for it to work well for you, do you ever start to sculpt a nude statue of Paris Hilton without a reference photo? it'll probably look nothing like her and would just be a nude statue of any women, which will look good anyway, but that's beside my point, breaking things down into easy manageable steps is really the best course of action anyone can do with any affiliate program promotion. By having a reliable back up plan to rely on could also save you the headache of losing time and wasting your effort on junk affiliate programs.

Let's take a look at the popular Clickbank market place for an example. Over there Clickbank has lots of digital products, such as ebooks, software and even membership sites, but if you take a good well informed look and study most of the products there, you will find that over half of them are low quality, quick fix, regurgitated rubbish that has been lifted from other sites in one form or another. The top performing clickbank products that are the bestsellers even may not be quality products, they might just be lead ins to buy something else (back end sales make more for affiliates than most other marketing strategies!)

The signs of a bad junk affiliate program is one were there is no real value and the quality of the product is either not very coherent in the text if it is an ebook or the software itself has numerous bugs and doesn't really match up to what was promised on the sales page, all of these things you should be able to recognize with a little affiliate experience as you go on with it.
Once you keep on top of the affiliate pulse of getting on top of new affiliates that arise in your niche, the better your chances with building up an ongoing relationship with individual affiliate merchants and company affiliates that belong to networks.

Taking your time to weed out the bad affiliates should be a brutal process, set yourself a realistic time frame for it's success, although don't spend too much time on them, unless they convert your affiliate sales into regular ones and maybe in the beginning promote them anonymously so no one can associate the bad recommendation with you if all goes bad, of course this process is a necessity to find out if they are just junk and not a fit for you and your affiliate business.

The good quality affiliate programs are those that don't make outlandish claims and they look very professional in design and offer lots of tools to help you promote them, but they may go beyond the simple tool box approach, they may offer free training on affiliate marketing in the form of a report or ebook and actually provide a way to contact them, if it's part of an affiliate network then an appointed affiliate manager will be on hand to help you out with any support issues you need answering. A good affiliate programs web copy will motivate you and inspire with words of encouragement to help you earn commissions, because if you make a sale, then they earn money too.

On both sides of the affiliate program referring actions it could be argued that the person who refers the sales as the affiliate is merely building someone else's business in return of a percentage and that's fine, because you should always stick to this principal yourself for your own affiliate business, because once you become fairly adept at making affiliate sales and bringing in affiliate checks you can then work in creative ways yourself to earn more money and build your business up too through multiple income streams. Affiliate marketing eventually works both ways, the more you bring in sales for certain merchants the more doors it'll open up for you in the long run.

The old saying of 'would you like fries' brings a prominent meaning to the marketing of related affiliate programs or systems that can be promoted together and that one leads directly into the other for maximum effect in clicks, sales or simple relevancy, typically the old marketing ploy of back end sales and supposed one time offers still works today as most of the guru's swear b it for that high end income stream that turns one sale into 2 to 4, while his form of affiliate marketing shouldn't be ruled out, it should be used sparingly for your best affiliate promotion.

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What Is The Affiliate Summit?

All image taken from Southwest SEO

It's an important event were affiliate marketers come together and share and network of course.

The Affiliate Summit is a once or twice a year gathering and brings along some great opportunities to network with other affiliate marketers in your niche or not, there are billboards for this and that and lots of people to meet, according to our friends across the pond this is THE affiliate event if you are serious about the internet's affiliate marketing.

I myself have not been to one of the affiliate events yet, but from the looks of the pictures below, I would most certainly like to take a trip out to the affiliate summit!



What is quite evident that there are lots of stalls with many affiliates promoting their programs and some you might have heard of and some you may not have, but what's interesting about these types of events is you can apparently learn quite a lot from networking and mingling with other affiliates out there.


Find Out More About The Affiliate Summit

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Freedom With Affiliate Marketing

Photo by Madddy

The freedom of affiliate marketing really is quite something, once you pass the technical side and the initial start up required with hard work and determination the sky's the limit and quite rightly so, You should try, because working from home is far better than working for someone else who just treats you like an employee (and yes we've all been there!)

To be free in the world of affiliate marketing takes time, build one affiliate website up, promote it, market it, reap the affiliate commissions, continue to analyze the results and move on to the next affiliate website, duplicate the process for each affiliate program and build your affiliate empire.

Also the freedom of affiliate marketing naturally implies that the freedom to choose is yours alone and the niche markets and interests are alone your choice to build yourself around.

More importantly the freedom of affiliate marketing means you don't answer to anyone else (except the tax man, but that's a different matter!)

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Choosing An Affiliate Network

When choosing an affiliate network to try and promote your chosen affiliate programs within your network account there are some top tips to think about before you make that decision.

Choosing an affiliate network is a necessary thing to do to put into your affiliate marketing plan, deciding one over another is one of the most important points to add to an ever growing promotional business here online.

Steps or important points to consider before you join a network

What popular brands and recognizable brands are featured within the network?

Is the network quite active with affiliates and even new merchants joining?

How are you paid? - What payment methods are available to you?

How successful are some of the top performing affiliates on a particular network?

Questions like this help you make some decisions, but also by doing your own research into these potential partner affiliate networks you can gain an understanding of what the network represents, also by choosing an affiliate network you can trial and error a certain account for all the tools it may provide, find the top programs in the niche that you are promoting and on your merry way you go.

Today in the affiliate age of the internet we are spoilt for choice with networks of all manner of performance based marketing incentive sites, so make your decision an choose wisely because once you choose an affiliate network an you stick with ongoing promotional activity, it's for life.

Typically though there are other things that are far important to consider like commission structures, affiliate competition and other marketing strategies, but for now just make sure you always do the required homework when starting out to make that choice of choosing an affiliate network.

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Affiliate Marketing Niche Markets How To Find Them

Affiliate marketing is a technical skill, but one that starts out life as an idea one that must be derived from popular results and current best selling products currently available.

Below is a video from youtube that shows you more than a few online places to find a niche worth investing some time and effort into with either a ppc campaign or whatever else you can do to promote your chosen niche affiliate products.

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Does The Thought Of Earning Money Online Cloud Your Judgement?

Image taken from Flickr

When we start out online in whatever we want to begin to achieve with our blogs, websites, web pages or our own little corner of the internets online publishing, there maybe a top reason why we started all this in the first place and that folks is money!

Money makes the world go around, but imagine earning money whilst doing the things that you love to do online at home,for most of us this is the main problem, we start out with good intentions of building up something great then we try and monetize everything, which is all very nice and a good path to follow, but this has a tendency to cloud our judgement in other areas.

So for instance, when I first started this blog over 2 years ago, I was intitially unsure of the direction starting out and it really started off as an all round earning online blog and it was an unfocused written blog that was purely driven to make money by whatever means, this clouded my judgement in the following areas:-

A) All I thought about was finding affiliate products to promote, regardless of the quality of them, this became the norm for a few weeks when I realised that this did not bring in any money whatsoever.

B) The above action had a negative impact on writing useful content that would benefit people,as no one was going to read affiliate ad after affiliate ad.

C) My motivation suffered as a result of not doing the right thing that took some required effort, thus an updated blog was not maintained for awhile.

Of course there were other elements that clouded my judgement, but I overcame these by not just thinking about the money, of course monetizing your online world is a factor that is in the background, but overall the content has to be a good chunk of applied time and effort to make any website a success.

Over time things progress and become what they are now, still with a few kinks, but far better than before, this blog is an affiliate marketing blog resource that totally focuses on issues surrounding affiliate earning, affiliate news and any other thing that affiliate marketing is and what it means to me and YOU the reader!

So if this post serves as a reminder to anyone that you should not just think about the money, but the marketing, the writing, the editing, and all the other technical skills you may need to make your online world a truthful vision, one that stays true to you and what you are about!

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