Blogging and affiliate marketing

[Sharknose]

Hi everyone,

Just a curious question.  Is anyone blogging and making money on here?  I see all these sights about it and how it can help subsidize your income.  Wondering if there is any truth to this or if its just another make money quick scheme.

Thank you for any responses

 

[Fivealive]

I think its more of a make money very slowly scheme.  It's definitely possible, but it often take years of consistent posting before you gain any traction.

 

[Deb_A]

It's definitely a make money slowly proposition. I used to be heavy into it, and got up to about $3,000 a month, but I lost interest and found out really quickly that it's not just a set it and forget it job. You have to do at least some maintenance daily to keep that money coming in.

I'm getting back into it now, but things have changed so much since I was in last time, it's taking me much longer to build income. I'm just reading a lot of books, watching a lot of YouTube videos and following their advice to the letter. I'm mostly working on my one blog now, which was a refurbished old blog that already had some subscribers, so I had a bit of a head start. Still, I wonder how many of those subscribers still even read it. I did make a bit on Amazon last week, though, so I'm not going to give up.

On my first time around, I posted daily to my blog and had the maximum number of ads that were allowed on Blogger and did pretty well. I'm still on Blogger, but I'm thinking seriously about going to Wordpress soon.

 

[rvwandering]

I think Fivealive is right. It takes a while to build up a following. Of the bloggers that I read the ones who make money got their start years ago when blogging was relatively new. Their blog posts are more often than not aimed at a specific audience.

 Youtube videos have taken over and some channels have huge audiences but I think it's just as hard to make money from videos as it is from a blog.

 

[Sharknose]

Thank you my friends for the insight and answers. I have started an online course on blogging and how to get started. I think its something Im going to try and start soon. Im not looking to get rich off of it by no means, just another added income to help

 

[Van-Tramp]

I have affiliate links on my blog, as well as had the per-click ads until recently. My blog gets 400-ish visitors each day and that has stayed true over it's eight years of operation. The Amazon affiliate income from by blog averages to be about $15-20 per month, and that amount was about right for the per-click ads from Amazon as well (they are canceling that program so it doesn't matter anymore). I post to my blog regularly and have for many years.

Now, I do not try to grow my traffic or intentionally go crazy with the affiliate links, so my site's income would be pretty low. With the right mind set - daily articles with product links thrown in - it could earn you a few hundred per month once you build up the traffic

The problem is; 1) Building traffic to your site costs time and money, 2) writing daily articles takes time. Time is money. If you are spending two-three hours each day writing for your blog, only to earn $100 per month, is that really a wage you want to work for?

 

[Sharknose]

thanks Van-Tramp. I appreciate the honesty. I know its like anything else the more you put in the more you get out. I will give it a shot, but I agree with you that it won't eat up all my time for a small $100/month. Right now Im kinda in the brainstorming phase and trying to get my financial/income straight before I make the leap. So I do greatly appreciate anyone and everyones feedback on this

 

[Van-Tramp]

I like to blog, so I keep doing it. I don't care if it earns a dime, but it is nice that it pays for itself too. My web-hosting costs $130 a year, and that is about what the blog makes in ads, so it works out perfect. But, blogging and ad revenue just wont pay. I'm sorry to be so brutally honest about it, but unless you are a hot 20-year old chick doing all her tasks on camera TOPLESS, it just doesn't make real money. Especially not enough money to justify the time invested. And honestly, what can be said/blogged that hasn't already been said a million times over by now?

If you are thinking of long term income and have the time, I recommend learning a trade that will allow you to travel and work at the same time. Learning to build websites via WordPress, PHP, etc is big money. I know a lot of full-timers that do this, and not only is there tons of work available these guys are getting $100+ per hour. This is a proper career and will take a bit to get to that point, but it is worth the effort.

For me, in early 2017 I took up software coding. It is free to start (download Microsoft Visual Studio for free, and start watching tutorials online) and within a few months you are doing something of real value. I combined learning the C# language with Unity (a game engine) and have already put two apps on the market, earning about $15k in sales. Not bad at all considering I spent about a month on each project. And the money is still coming in every month. And as I get better in my coding I can tackle bigger projects and earn more from them. Not only has it been fairly easy to learn, it is fun! I seriously enjoy my work weeks where I get to plug away at the code and build new things in my apps.

I chose learning coding for a few reasons; 1) I've always wanted too make my own software, 2) I want a livelihood that is mobile AND does not require an internet connection, and 3) I want to do my own damn thing, not for a boss of a client, just my own ideas that I will enjoy.

Some links if you want to get started:
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/
https://unity3d.com/

 

[Sharknose]

Im with you there on the doing my own damn thing. Im anxious to get away from the rat race...just need to be able to support myself to do it. My measly Navy retirement don't go very far, but it is something.

I have no back ground in the computer coding field and it all seems greek to me. But 23 years of service has shown me that I am trainable. How much of a back ground did you have in it before you started software coding in 2017?

Beings that I am kinda starting all over at my early age of 46, I am very open minded about my next steps.

 

[highdesertranger]

" I am very open minded about my next steps"

that is a very important first step. highdesertranger

 

[Van-Tramp]

I self taught some very basic coding in 2014 (I would have been 43 yrs then) so when I took it up properly in 2017 I had some basics, but not a lot.

 

[Escapewheel]

Van-Tramp, any courses you would recommend that would be worthwhile?  Tons of stuff online so it gets confusing as to what to focus on.
Looking for a career change and i'm a little older than you so i'm motivated to get going. I've got hours a day to devote to this.... tried coding on a free sight years ago then lost interest but now i'm ready to get back into it. Played around with Htlm today from a utube vid.
Thanks for your insight

 

[Sharknose]

I still think I am going to attempt the blogging and affiliated marketing, just not depend on any income from it. If I make a little cash by doing it great, if not its ok. At that point its just doing it for the learning and experience of doing it, which is high on my list of life importances.

 

[Van-Tramp]

Escapewheel, maybe we should start another thread on that subject

 

[RogerD]

I've been promoting affiliate / CPA offers full-time for over 17 years.

I heavily promote PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers. This is because there is no credit card / purchase required to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates are typically much higher compared to offers that require a sale to be made.

I favor offers that have a make, get or save money benefit to them, as they have overall worked the best. They also tend to have the greatest mass appeal (will be of interest to a large general audience), so the potential exists to produce high volume and they are fairly easy to cross promote on the back-end.

Some of the verticals (niches) I have done extremely well with are: education, insurance, loans, debt, credit, mortgage, assistance, discount offers, homeowner offers, etc...

The bulk of the PPL offers that I promote pay $20-$40 per lead, but I also promote offers that pay more and less. You don't want to get too caught up on what an offer pays because how well it converts is just as important. For example, if you have an offer that pays $9, but if it converts at 2X or more of a $20 offer, then it will perform about the same or possibly better. At the same time, if you have an offer that pays $90 and it converts poorly, it may not even be worth promoting.

I have also done just as good with dating website sign-ups and pretty good with free trial + S/H offers. I also promote a very limited number of offers that are straight sales offers. However, mass appeal needs to exist and I also look for one of the following...

1) The product is new and/or novel-unique and you can't purchase it locally or even something similar. I don't waste my time with it once it or something similar shows up in Walmart.

2) The buyer can truly get what is being offered at a decent discount.

3) Solves a house is on fire type problem.

However, most of the above I will promote on the back-end. Which is why the first thing I look for is mass appeal.

Bottom line, it's far easier to get someone fill out a short form than to get them to pull out their credit card and make a purchase. So why struggle with trying to sell this or that, when you can provide free information that users want/need and get paid well doing it.

However, having great offers that convert is only half the picture. You have to be able to drive cost-effective / targeted traffic to the offers and that's where most fail. They end up spending more on traffic than they make.

Anyway, something to think about.

 

[Sharknose]

Wow, great info ROGERD. Thank you

 

[JuliaAnne2018]

I blog/copywrite for a living and always wanted to do affiliate marketing. Maybe I will finally have more free time to do that. I have a lot of creative projects I'm working on too.

So do you really make a living from this PPL? My problem is not making enough time for my own blogs. I know some PPL jobs require 10k visitors or more per month. I really gotta get on that...

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[RogerD]

I blog/copywrite for a living and always wanted to do affiliate marketing. Maybe I will finally have more free time to do that. I have a lot of creative projects I'm working on too.

So do you really make a living from this PPL? My problem is not making enough time for my own blogs. I know some PPL jobs require 10k visitors or more per month. I really gotta get on that...

Sent from my RS500 using Tapatalk

I've done extremely well promoting PPL (pay per lead) offers.

However, I do things quite differently than most affiliate marketers.

I drive traffic by building responsive email lists using fresh / targeted 3rd party email data and generating real-time, co-reg leads.

3rd party data is email leads of users that have shown an interest in a specific PPL niche or offer and have given permission to receive messages from third parties. You get the opt-in record of each user and it's 100% can-spam compliant.

Co-reg is simply where you place an ad for a specific PPL offer on a co-registration network and their publishers display it at the time a user is signing up with them and can request more info about the offer. When a user requests more info, their contact info is then automatically imported into your ESP account. Which you would have set up to automatically send a message regarding the offer. You pay on a per lead basis.

So with the above, I am getting fresh / targeted leads specifically for the PPL offers I'm promoting. However, they are not typically as responsive as a high-quality opt-in list that you build yourself. So to compensate for this you need to work with higher volume. This is not a big deal since the cost is much cheaper and highly scalable compared to traditional list building methods.

When mailing, you want to skim off the top any fast-track conversions and then for long-term success, you want to always be collecting your opens / clickers, segmenting and removing unresponsive users...converting the leads from quantity to quality and into responsive lists. Which you can then also cross-promote other offers on the back-end.

Really what I'm doing is monetizing email data. So basically I promote PPL offers because they provide the path of least resistance to generating conversions/$$$ and converting the data into cash producing assets.

There's actually more to it than it sounds, but done right it can be extremely profitable. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, for the most part, does 6-7 figures. While that's a huge range, much comes down to one's ability to scale and effectively build / manage the infrastructure needed in order to scale.

 

[JuliaAnne2018]

I've done extremely well promoting PPL (pay per lead) offers.

However, I do things quite differently than most affiliate marketers.

It's a little over my head right now, but I am definitely interested. Please send details to my inbox.

Thanks,

Julie

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