Complete Newbie Goes From $0 to $126/Day In Under 4 Months. Here's How.

Hello All.

Dan Brock here.

August 2009 marked, to what I consider, my first successful month(in internet marketing)with over $4000 in commissions from various products I have been promoting. I just started affiliate marketing in May 2009, so to me, that is a very big jump in income. I now have over 40 websites and I just released my first product last month(still learning about product launches).

I just wanted to share my story of success with you all. Before I get into it, there is a couple things I wanted to get straight.

While I have never done any affiliate marketing before, I have run a successful web hosting business that, during it's height, made me over $23,000/m. Because of that, I think it puts me a head of a complete newbie for one reason: I know that it's possible to make money online.

Where I am certain I will succeed as an affiliate marketer, complete newbies probably have doubts and and uncertainties - this is what has given me an advantage over the complete newbie.

(and not to mention I have virtually unlimited resources to start websites as I already own a bunch of dedicated servers).

I never spent a single penny advertising.

A lot of you are probably going to think I have an advantage because I have money to invest into advertising my affiliate sites. This is not the case because I used nothing but free methods to promote my sites - mostly SEO and article marketing.

Here is how I did it.

I bought Chris Rempel's affiliate marketing course and started hacking away at it. While I have evolved my method since then, I think his course(the cheap $30 one) is a pretty good starting point to anyone new to affiliate marketing.

It started out pretty crappy...

My first month, May, was pretty fruitless. I think I made something like $100 that month. My first two sites were a complete bust. I listened to what Chris said and tried out the 'Spyware Removal' niche. 4 months later and I have still yet to make a sale from it(hint for all you thinking about trying that niche).

Now, most people would probably throw in the towel at that point - but I was determined to make money so I moved on to other sites.

I tried the Amazon Affiliate program next.

I kind of like the Amazon affiliate program. While the payouts suck(6-7% commission), you can make a good run at it if you promote products that cost more than $100. Anyway, what I would do is just go on there, find items more than $100, run them through the Google Adwords tool and see if there is any search volume for it. If I saw more than 3000 searches/m for the product, I would consider writing an article on it.


A couple good niches to start out with:

• High-end Headphones
• Womens Boots

In the month of June, I had maybe 5 websites where I was promoting Amazon products. I used these 5 websites to fund my next batch of websites. I think in the month of June I made about $500-$600. All I was doing was writing maybe 10 articles per website, adding the articles to MY website and building links to them. Nothing too difficult here...

Then I moved on to the 'Shotgun Method'


So after the month of June I decided to be more serious about my affiliate marketing(I had to first prove to myself it was possible to make money without spending money). So what I did was start pumping out websites day after day. I would aim to complete one website every 2 days.

What I did was put up a simple wordpress blog, find my niche via the Amazon marketplace, run the words through the adwords keyword tool to determine it was a product people bought, and then I would go to www.textbroker.com and have my 300 word articles written for each product I could find that fit within the niche of my website.

From there I would post one article per day/niche site until I ran out of articles to add. I would simultaneously build a small amount of links to the pages as I added them. I would then watch to see which niche site were selling, and reproduce them if it went well. If a site didn't perform, I would just drop it off my list, never to work on it again.

At the end of July I made about $1.5k that month from my Amazon sites and a couple other random affiliate products I was promoting through various affiliate networks.

I evolved my process once more.

There was only one problem with my method and that was it would take about 3 weeks before I could see any sort of results, because as you know, it takes awhile before search engines will start sending you traffic.

So what I decided to do was move away from the 'product review model' and go to the 'problem solving model'.

What I would do is pick a niche where people wanted a problem solved and one that had an affiliate program with decent payout($20-$40 per sale).

Now, i'm not talking about minor problems here. I'm talking about problems that will make a person lose sleep over. Things related to pain, aging, monetary issues, etc.
Once I find the niche, I have articles written.
What I will do is have 10 articles written for me which I will upload to sites like Ezinearticles and Goarticles. I use these 10 articles to probe the niche to see if it is worthwhile to expand on.

Here is how I setup my traffic pattern:

Article --> My product review page on my website --> vendor website(where they buy the product).

In my article, I will address the problem they have, some simple ways to cure it, and then I will say something like 'If you really want THE solution for _______, then I highly recommend you try [product name]. this stuff works amazingly well. Check out my review of it here:[url to your review on YOUR website]'

After your articles are approved and you build some links to each one of your articles, you should be able to tell whether a niche is profitable within a week. I generally look for products that I can make convert under 1:40.

Once I determine a niche is worthwhile, I will order 10 more articles and add them to MY website so that I can start making an authority website for my niche. For each article added to my own site, I set up the articles to flow the traffic to my review page on the same website.

By sending them through this process, you can increase your conversion rates 10 fold. The idea is to give them something useful in your article(this builds trust), then start sending them through your pages so that the user will feel as if they have researched enough, and want to move onto the solution. The idea is get them to think that your affiliate product is THE solution for their problem - you want them to come to this conclusion on their own.

With this process, at the end of August I brought in $3.5k in sales between my Amazon review sites and my problem solving websites.

What I am working on next.

I am working on list building for my niche sites. This is something I kind of put off for later while I was probing the niches I wanted to work in. I am hoping I can double my revenue once I learn to properlly market via email.

They key to my success.

There isn't one thing that I would say is the key, however there are some things that played a big role in my success so far:

Self confidence - While I have the occasional doubts like everyone else, I told myself that I will be successful at this no matter what. This is where people throw in the towel. Once that doubts start popping up in their head, they start to tell themselves they won't make money. Once you tell yourself you won't make any money, that is exactly what will happen.

Being persistent - My first 2 sites bombed horribly. These 2 sites have yet to make me any sales even though I have sent plenty of traffic to them. Through these failures however, I have learned that those types of niches are not worth going after. Without those 2 failures, I probably would not be targeting the niches I am targeting now. IMO, when you fail, you learn the most.

That's it guys and gals. It's not like you have to be a rocket scientist to figure this stuff out. All you have to do is keep practicing and learning through the websites that you have made previously. Just keep at it and I guarantee that you will make some good money at this.

Keep learning and most all, keep trying!
-Daniel Brock

 

Believing in yourself is the first step and is the most important step to make money online.

You knew that and you did it again.

Thanks for sharing this with all of us.

 

Yes, commitment is very crucial.

I know that a lot of people get into this MMO without being fully committed to it.

They want to 'try it out' first.

If you go into this with a mindset of i'm just going to try it out, you are already headed in the wrong direction.

You must do something with 100% commitment or else your results will really suffer.

Thanks for the comment!

 

Great guide; however, isn't it illegal to post affiliate links to EzineArticles?

 

No - they allow them if you put a TLD in place of the affiliate link and redirect the TLD to the vendor website. Works fine.

I personally like to post the articles so that my resource box points to my review page on my website, which links them to my affiliate offer.

Better conversion rates this way, and gets around the possible problem with posting affiliate links on ezine.

Hope that makes sense!

 

excelent post, very motivating. im going to submit some articles to directories right now!

 

well and nice topic , i hope much more newbie reach you as soon as they read your topic :d

 

This was a great guide and I will definitely be bookmarking this. But did you make a total of $126 or is that before you subtract all the costs of other things to get traffic.

 

Hello,

This entire method revolves around free traffic so that is not an expense.

The only heavy expense is to have the articles written, which costs roughly $75 per site. You can do it yourself at first, then outsource later on

You also have the cost of a domain name and a web hosting plan.

That's it.

 

nice..........oneeee

 

TLD is like tinyurl right?

And yea, I was planning on linking to a review and the product like you.

Thanks for the reply.

And also, how did you build links/traffic to your website besides article marketing?

 

No, A TLD is a top level domain so www.yourreviewsite.com/

you would setup a 301 redirect so when people visit www.yourreviewsite.com it redirects them straight to the vendor page.

For link building I do link building over extended periods of time. No more than 1-2 links per week per site.

Blog commenting, forum posting, profile commenting, web 2.0s, etc.

Your standard link building stuff.

 

Great thank for sharing man. In addition, great information, I can definatly learn a lot from this as I am a newbie as well.
Just one question if you don't mind, what type of traffic do you get to your sites, and do you mind telling us your most successful sites.
Cheers

 

Good stuff. It's nice to read positive threads by others who have "made it happen" instead of the usual "How can I make money" posts.

Kudos on your success.

 

Great. You wrote one of those stupid CB e-book sales pages and pasted it on DP.

Why you ruined a decent thread with crap like that ^ ^ is beyond me.

 

I stopped reading here, its clearly just spam so fuck off

 

Hello,

This achievement was done through pure affiliate marketing. No product sales were totaled into this figure. All figures made were through the exact method I posted above.

Regards,
Daniel

 

You clearly have no clue as to what you are talking about.

Chris is a well respected internet marketer and a great teacher. I am not affiliated with him in anyway. Did you see any affiliate links posted? No, I think not.

Get some skills baby!

 

I have skills baby

 

Proof of earnings?