Hello good people, today's affiliate life lesson is aimed at urging us to recall the importance of the adage: "Work smarter, not harder". You see, around a year ago I came across a method that seemed to work for me: setting up extremely focused keyword-specific domains, with the purpose of "sniping" traffic from long tail keywords. This method is interesting because it calls for nearly none link building to secure top rankings... which is a plus, since I'm not too good at it. Anyway, during the past year I've been using this technique to develop over a dozen of these sniper sites, with varying degrees of success... as naturally expected. To begin with, I developed a bunch of websites promoting clickbank products, such as the one documented in the case study in my sig... but even though these websites were indeed making some cash, it wasn't nearly enough to make a living. While these clickbank websites provided me with an initial auto-pilot revenue stream in the $3xx monthly range, it was not until I started thinking out of the box that I started getting some really encouraging results. Suffice to say, my latest project which I started developing in December 2010 is now drawing just about %50 of my monthly auto-pilot revenue (which is about $1000/month... yeah, I'll still getting started). For this project, I decided to go in a entirely different direction from everything I had done before: I created a sniper website for a *local* business keyword. This keyword is just getting 1,000 queries per month, from which I'm now funneling about 350 per month -- but (and it's a HUGE but) -- it's related with a high-ticket product that nets me a handsome $xxx per sale... and so far 23 prospects surfaced, 12 of which converted into customers... in less than two months. From all the websites I developed so far, this was by far the easiest and less time-consuming project. Competition levels were practically non-existent for the target keyword, and using the sniper formula it was nearly effortless getting #1 rankings within a month of creation. I spent maybe 3 hours setting everything up, then 1 hour building some basic links... total 4 hours of labor, for the single most efficient concentrated effort I have ever done in my career as an affiliate marketer. (Naturally, since the website started converting I'm now spending more time with it, thinking of ways to tweak & expand ;-) but that's a different story). And do you know what's actually funny about this whole story? I achieved this victory nearly by accident! During a dinner party last December, I was chatting with a friend of mine who works at this dealership I'm now affiliated with. I was talking about my latest on-line entrepreneurialisms, and at some point he mentioned "hey you know.... I'm pretty sure that if you managed to send some leads to the company, they would be more than happy to pay low $xxx per sale" Just as he said that, my eyes likely gleamed, as the thought raced through my head: "I may be sitting on a gold mine here, while struggling for pennies on-line" I snagged someone's netbook that was laying on the table, fired up the Keyword tool, did some basic research, and told my friend "I am pretty sure that starting in early 2011, I'll be sending a good half-dozen clients your way". And for once, I was right. Well... I hope you can see past the bragging here, and for once look closely at your surroundings and look for untapped monetization opportunities. It doesn't have to be exclusively on-line, neither does it have to be exclusively off-line. It can be both, because those are two sides of the same coin. Get creative in your marketing efforts, and don't just work yourself to the ground. Make sure you know what you're doing, and find ways to get more results with less effort. That's how you really get to start growing... in life as in affiliate marketing.