Pursuit of Profit

Setting up an affiliate landing page is a lot of work! I once had the impression you just host a pre made site, slap some tracking on it, start sending ppc traffic to it and watch the money pile up. This is probably why I’ve had mixed results with ppc advertising in the past.

There was a time a few years ago that this way of marketing could net you a couple hundred dollars a day. This is when I launched my first affiliate marketing for a peer to peer music downloading program, and without much tweaking I was in the profit zone. I made sales of between $50 -$100 a day and a profit that would go from $10-$50 a day depending on conversion rates.

I tried promoting with this old school style more recently, and basically it just doesn’t work! Nowadays you need relevant content, you need a catchy landing page and you need golden keywords that have low bids. This doesn’t sound very easy, and I am 2 years removed from the game, so this affiliate site I’m making could be a very expensive learning experience if I’m not careful!

Well I am definitely going to put my effort into this affiliate project. Today I got my start by purchasing a domain name and finalizing my products to offer down to 3 from my short list of about 15. I created my hoplinks in clickbank, which is a way of tracking your referall click-throughs.

Once I completed that I got on to designing the site layout and then on to making some buttons in photoshop. They look pretty good if I do say so myself!

The site is designed to compare three top products in a table, head to head to head in a visual table so the key information is easily extracted by the user. The user is given the information and prompted to go to the products homepage via an affiliate link.

I have the buttons completed, but the html on the site is giving me a few headaches. I should have the site up by tomorrow. Once it’s up I will have a friend look it over for errors and anything that could be improved. Shouldn’t be too long before I move on to keywords, tracking and the make or breaker…traffic!

In keeping with yesterday’s momentum, this blog got it’s adsense clicked a bit more and bumped me up to a 2 day whooping total of $4.28. I don’t think I should get too excited and declare this a huge victory yet! There are still 11 months ahead of me with each one increasing by 100%.

I knew the first month would be pretty easy to take care of, but I didn’t think I would almost be there in the first 36 hours. You are the ones who helped me making it to my first mini milestone, thanks!