Income Flucuates During Peak Seasons

I have an automated website that uses the ebay affiliate system to display auctions.  That website should do pretty good for me this holiday season considering it’s related to Iron Man Collectibles.  The key with that site is the keywords that I have used throughout the site related to iron man and collectibles.  You can really get the search engines to bite when you use keywords in the titles of your posts or in the header of the pages you are promoting.  When the shopping seasons are slow, the income from this site is low, but as soon as people are looking for collectibles from the movie as gifts, the income rises significantly.  Try not to promote any hot offers when there won’t be people looking for that product.

Playing the Search Engine Market

If you plan to promote offers through PPC, I must say that you are more brave than I am at this point.  The competition is tough and unless you have a tight niche, you are going to find yourself up against many more promoting the same offer.  One tip that I can give, and I have talked about it before, is using the advertising platform that Myspace has launched recently.

Myspace will be extremely busy with kids out of school for a couple of days this coming week and again in December AND January.  I have had some success with advertising on Myspace, I would recommend taking a look at their platform if you haven’t already.  It is quick and easy to setup an ad and with a minimum of $25 you can get a decent amount of clicks.  Using the demographic and interest filters they offer, you can really get your ad into a more targeted market.

Places Offering Free, Valuable Information

Events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are also busy days of the year that have people flocking to the internet to find the best deal on everything.  You can check out websites like Amazon.com, pulse.ebay.com or consumerreports.com for products that will be searched for and purchased in mass quanities this shopping season.  Using the internet as a search tool to find this information is the first step.  There is plenty of free information available, so search long and hard before spending money on guides or software to help in the search.

I don’t make $10,000 a month, yet, but I do have the knowledge needed to gain each month.  I have been slowly working on my website portfolio and each one is really considered it’s own “business”, at least by me.  I read blogs, forums and guides every week that teach me something that I can apply to these “businesses”.  I encourage you to do the same.  In the meantime I am going to work on posts for future publishing, regarding results and affiliate network howto’s.  Stay tuned.

What is Adbrite?

Adbrite allows you to reach a targeted audience with your ads.  Whether you want to sell a product to a large audience or if you want to find a specific niche and pound the network with an affiliate offer, Adbrite can help you.  Serving your ad to a possible 80,000+ sites, you are sure to find the customers you are looking for.

Adbrite has some of the largest sites in their network, including;

• Digg.com
• Neopets.com
• Yahoo.com
• Lycos.com
• Vh1.com

So, if you really want to reach a large audience, you certainly have that option with Adbrite.

What does Adbrite offer?

The ad types include CPC, CPM, Banners, Text, Full Page Ads and Video Ads.  This allows you to target even a smaller audience, because some of these types of ads will work best on specific sites.  With a nicely targeted banner ad, or full page ad, you should be able to convert a sale.

So I have been playing around with affiliate offers on the network recently.  You can get some nice CPC rates if you do your homework.  My latest ad cost me about $10 and I made over $30 with it in just one day.  That was my first test, but from now on, it’s full on campaign time.

Do you use Adbrite.com to promote affiliate offers?

If you are like a lot of people, you want to make money the easiest way possible.  Some argue that making money online isn’t as easy as people make it look.  I would say there is a little truth to that, but if you do the research and read, read, read, you learn quickly that there are many ways to make money online the easy way.

Get Your Blog On

Let’s start with a blog.  You know that it’s easier than setting up a regular website.  Wordpress.org is an excellent place to start, but if you don’t want to shell out a couple of bucks for a domain name, then head over to blogger.com and get a free one setup.

Choose Affiliate Network 

Affiliate networks are all over the place and have tons of offers for you to choose from.  But if you do not take the right ones, you will make no money quickly.  You don’t necessarily have to have a specific niche on your blog, but it does help when choosing offers.

You might not think that it is very easy to choose the right offers, but just sit and think about it for a minute.  Is the offer relevant?  Will the traffic coming to this post want to click the text link or banner for more information?  Those are just two of the questions that will help out a great deal when trying to decide what offers to promote. 

The Rest of the Story 

This blog has a couple of niches, if you will, and I have had some success with a couple of ads you might see around.  The reason?  Well, I watched my stats, checked keywords and targeted the ads directly to the traffic that is coming in from search engines.  With the right analytic software, this is fairly easy to do.  Google Analytics is a great place to start and they are offered free.

Once you have chosen an offer, set up a post directing traffic to it, keep an eye on how well it does.  Watch impressions, clicks, conversions of that ad each day.  You will want to make sure it’s worth the space to have that ad there.  Your Most affiliate networks provide many reports to track this.

If you see that your ads are not converting well, don’t get all crazy and remove the ads, just try and come up with a reason it might not be doing well.  Do you have enough traffic?  Is the ad placed in a good area of the post or page?  Is the text hard to read or the banner flicker like mad?  All of these could be factors, but in the end you will want to test, test, test.

Maybe put 2-3 different banners in rotation on that spot and track the results.  Once you find which banner converts better, you can show just that one.  Do the research on your offers, it pays in the long run.

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