A few weeks back I quit my day job.. There were many reasons for doing that, but overall it felt like a good decision. So, now that I am jobless again I guess I have to restart my affiliate marketing "bussiness" that I quit almost 2 years ago..
If you have no idea what affiliate marketing is then here's a short description I pulled out of my head:
Affiliate marketing is a way for people who lack the charisma, creativity, funds or whatever to start their own product to make money online. So, instead they promote the products of others and get a cut for each successful sale they make. There are literally all kinds of products you can promote. Food, supplements, medical equipment, furniture, seeds, computers, cars, digital products, penis enlargement devices, breast enlargement creams, toilet paper. Think of anything, chances are there is a program you can apply to promote that and get a cut. Whether the product actually works and the price is fair is of course a totally different discussion.
And of course there are literally thousands of methods to promote said products, like youtube videos, facebook ads, twitter or whatever.
As for me, the one method I had the most success with in the past was by creating my own websites and doing SEO (search engine optimization) for them. Of course, that's just the summary. This one sentence actually entails hundreds if not thousands of hours that are needed before you actually start making regular sales and having a stable income you can actually live with. But after you reach a point, doing some maintenance here and there is usually more than enough to give you a nice, relatively passive income..
Do I like affiliate marketting? Nah, actually it's one of the most boring jobs if you ask me. This is one of the reasons I stopped it. But it comes with other perks.. The good think is that I don't have to start from zero. I already have a site from two years back when I stopped, with over 50 generic articles, and 5 articles that promote products and actually make money. So, I have a good start and most of the grunt work is ready. I am pretty sure in 4-5 months I can bring it back to its "peak", 2 years ago, when it was making about 2k $ a month. Since then I totally stopped working on it and sales have been gradually going down.. But still, it makes something despite being abandoned. Here's my amazon earnings for June for that particular site:
As you can see the last 23 days I have made about 60 $. Nothing too fancy, but let me repeat that this is a site I literally haven't touched for 2 years! And 60 $ / month may seem depressing but it's actually a very very good start.
So, what's my plan? For starters I will search for any new content related to my site that I have missed these last 2 years. One of the things google loves is fresh content. That particular site is on a specific niche with a slightly scientific angle so I am sure I will find a few new research publications to write about. After that comes the link building part. Link building is again another important thing when it comes to driving traffic to your own websites. If you want to be high on google and hence get traffic from it you need two things:
- Good content
- Good backlinks
They both are important and they both complement each other. And here's a question I now have for your:
What would you like to read in these posts?
I plan to make these kinds of posts on a regular basis. One reason is to keep track ofmy progress so that I stay motivated. The other one is of course the rewards from the posts themselves which are a nice secondary income. Furthermore, these posts don't require any research from my side so they are easy and quick to write so it's a win win any way I see it.
But! I understand nobody will be interested in reading something along the lines "Day 25, today I made one quadrilion bucks in commissions and wrote 2 articles for my site". So, what I plan for these posts is to break them into two parts. One part, about my personal progress and one part where I will teach you how to do something, e.g. how to make your first site, what is off-page seo, how to build backlinks, how to write a review for a product or something like that. So, is there something particular you would like to see?
I guess if I get no feedback and nobody is interested in this I will just follow the flow :D