How To Make Money

Day 14 of the challenge had us just watching a couple of videos from Ed, explaining to us how we are initially going to be making money with the 30 Day Challenge process. First up, though, he told us that we must write another 3 pieces of content on our keyword phrases...yikes! It had taken me 3 days just to get through the first three pieces, now I gotta write another three?! Actually, after writing the initial three articles on each keyword phrase I'd managed to learn enough from them to not only get interested in my niches enough to want to learn more (and therefore write more), but I also managed to get into the swing of writing in general, and don't feel anywhere near the pressure I did prior to writing anything.

Ed took us through a couple of ways of finding our affiliate product to promote. Yes, I know what you're thinking, the 30 day challenge is just about affiliate marketing...well, personally I don't actually see whats so wrong about that in the first place (in the second place, no, it's not actually going to be an affiliate marketing exercise). If this was just about selling someone else's product I wouldn't be disappointed at all. Plenty of people out there make plenty of money from affiliate sales - and those people don't have Ed and Dan's cutting edge marketing techniques on hand - so I really don't have a problem with it at all. But as Ed says, the ultimate goal is for us to be selling our own products (and therefore reaping all the rewards instead of just a commission). I don't know if we'll actually have time to go right into product creation as part of the 30 Day Challenge, although with the amount of content that has been coming through so far from the guys I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to fit that in with only 14 days to go (10 really, as there is no content uploaded on the weekends). I say there are only 14 days to go because I'm actually writing this on Day 18.

So Ed took us over to clickbank.com to look up some affiliate products to promote. I'm not the biggest fan of clickbank, as I find it's been overrun by a lot of crappy products with poor sales pages. Some of the sales pages have their own name squeeze (a form to get you on their mailing list) and I'm sure part of this challenge will be learning to use our own name squeeze...perhaps. But on the whole the site is good for finding something to promote for the challenge. Ed pointed out that this is not our main goal, but we are only using an affiliate product as a means to test to see if the market are actually willing to spend money. If you link to a good affiliate sales page and people go through your site to the product and buy it, and they do it often, then you know it's a good market. Some markets may get lots of searches, but predominately just from tire-kickers, people who aren't interested in spending money. This works as a way of seeing if the market is going to make you money in the long run.

Ed also took us through Amazon.com, for those people who couldn't find a product on clickbank.com. As you would be aware Amazon.com sell almost everything, and up until I saw the video I didn't realise they had an affiliate program. They only pay out commissions of 10%, which is paltry compared to the commissions you can get on clickbank - but as I mentioned, this isn't about getting money, it's just about recording the amount of sales. I do understand why Amazon's commissions are so small compared to clickbank, though. Amazon deal in real products, whereas clickbank deal in digital products. Digital products are a lot cheaper to produce, and are usually produced by the person who is selling them, therefore they can dish out high commissions to entice affiliate marketers to promote their products. Amazon deal in products created by others, so they have had to pay an initial wholesale fee for the product, and therefore cannot afford to hand out too big of a commission. Also, as Amazon is so HUGE and well known throughout the world, I dare say they don't need that much help selling their products anyway.

So after having a browse through clickbank I only found one product for one of my niches and none for the other - pretty much what I had expected. Amazon had plenty of stuff I could promote and so I signed up with them. Unfortunately, seeing as I'm in Australia, I only have the choice of receiving my affiliate commissions by cheque or gift certificate. If I choose a cheque I lose US$15 for each cheque they send me - so I picked the gift certificate. I figure if I actually do sell anything and make some money I can always find something in Amazon to spend it on.

So now I'm off to write my next three articles...