My Affiliate Marketing (AM) Life
How time has flown since I first started in Affiliate Marketing. 'They' say that time flies when you are having fun! Well if the first 12 months of my Affiliate Marketing business are anything to go by then 'They' surely have no idea what they are talking about. Who are 'They' anyway?
Affiliate Marketing as a hobby, to bring in a few extra pounds is all well and good but when you make the decision to make a 'living' from it then it becomes a completely different matter.
I made that decision in December 2006 when after a number of years setting up and running an SMS service for Golf Clubs, called GolfSmart SMS, I decided to sell that business and try something a 'little different'. The SMS business was just too slow, not enough revenue to expand and in all honesty I realised that the return for all my effort was just not there.
So in that fateful December after a few months of 'dabbling' with the help of an online Affiliate School I took the plunge to start my Affiliate Business full time in the world of Finance. This involved the generation of web generated leads (loan applications) for a number of the leading UK loan & remortgage companies.
As a Finance affiliate the commissions are very good but the competition is very high. This whole area of Affiliate Marketing was to become a very good learning stage for many different aspects of working online.
From a technical view point it forced me to learn a lot more than I thought possible, plus it helped me to discover how to work smarter not harder, although it did take me some time to master that particular work ethic.
When I first started at Affiliate Marketing I knew little or nothing about Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), web design, copywriting, writing articles and numerous other invaluable skills. In fact with the skills I've acquired I can easily command consultancy fees of £500+/day but that all sounds like too much hard work for me. I don't fancy trading all that hard work for a good salary when I now work shorter hours and earn considerably more money.
So my introduction to Affiliate Marketing was pretty brutal in that in order to get up and running quickly the best way is to try your hand at PPC. This is not for the faint hearted, if you don't know what you are doing, and in the early days I was a slow learner so I got my fingers burned and 'peed' away a lot of money in trying to make things work. Bear in mind that some of the Top Keywords such as 'secured loans', 'debt consolidation loans' cost £3-£5 per click. Suffice to say I wasn't paying that for my keywords but I soon learned there is more than one way to skin a cat and lessons learned about PPC since I first started will stand me in good stead for many years to come.
Luckily I also had some good teachers who were patient and I eventually mastered PPC and even more importantly Google Adwords which is one of the biggest PPC advertisers. You also have MSN Adcenter and Yahoo, both of which I mastered.
Having finally mastered PPC I soon discovered that it was possible to make a 'very good living' online and this was in just one Niche. All I had to do now was transfer the knowledge I had gained from the finance market into other Niches too. So over the last 18 months and more importantly over the last 6 months I have been able to put a lot of my AM business onto auto-pilot where I can now earn a substantial amount while only doing weekly 'admin' on some of my best performing sites.
Having mastered the art of PPC I still wasn't happy paying all that money for PPC traffic every month so I then jumped into the world of SEO. This is a totally different world to PPC but if you know what you are doing then you can marry both of them for some 'explosive' results online.
And it's been my foray into the SEO world which has allowed me generate the most return on my effort. You see I now have a network of 80+ websites, all of which require little attention. And whatever attention they do need I can sub-contract it to other people online. This forms part of my 'working smarter - not harder' principle.
Now, rather than paying for all PPC traffic I get 1,000's of visitors to my network of sites each month through free organic searches. So when each visitor goes on to complete an application for a loan or buy a product through one of my sites then the commissions are pretty much 'pure profit' each time.
All that work and effort over the last 18 months has been worth the effort and if it's one thing I have learned that to be successful online you need to put in the time and effort. Even with all the best brains and people around you, there are still things you have to do for yourself.
All the best
Paul Haughney
Email: contact@paulhaughney.com