The Troubles with Affiliate Marketing



It must have been almost five years now when I decided to leave my job and work for myself. My first experience with working for myself was "Affiliate Marketing" and it was my cousin who had got me involved. When I look back on it, my first sites were so nasty, I basically made up a webpage on Burberry put some pictures on it linked them to searches on eBay and also stuffed a load of keywords down the side, these also linked to eBay.

Then I needed to get my site with one page into the search engine and that is where Inktomi came in. I just paid them a small amount and within three days my site was now in MSN, and I earned good money right away. So with what I thought was success, I then went onto make another 30 sites just like that, all be it on different subjects.

I was young and foolish at the time as I really thought I had myself a good business going. But how stupid was I? The first sign of this not being the correct way of building a website was when Google Adsense got in touch with me and told me that I was in breach of their terms and conditions, and that I had to change the site or remove the Adsense from the site. I went on to remove the adsense from a few of the sites as I was still earning plenty from eBay.

As time went on I now had about 70 sites like this and I was earning about $7,000 a month, but then I was about to get hurt in the way of a Google algorithm change, the first of many I might add.

Well my money went down by about 75 percent. Things were bad, so I now looked for something different to earn my money, and that is where the eBay API came in. I had got the code from them and made a bunch of new sites, within three weeks I was earning money from them, nothing like what I used to earn, but money all the same.

It continued for about a year and they all got hit by another algorithm change but this time from all the search engines. Ok, so I was a bit naive as I kept thinking why does this keep happening? So I thought about it and said if I was on the internet and came across one of my sites would I like it? Well my answer was no. The second thing that I thought about was where is all my promotion for my sites. It would just be like opening up a new store and not telling anybody.

So that is when I decided to do things right from the start and that was to think basics. What is the internet all about? And the answer is information, so I decided to build just a couple of websites so I could concentrate and focus just on two which I feel is the key.

I then said to myself, I need to make sure that I am always promoting my website to many places, always make sure that the content is fresh and that people would want to come back to the site.

Comments: [0] / Post comment:
05 Dec 2008 01:14:17

Online Auction Sites Hanging in Legal Limbo - Wired News

Online Auction Sites Hanging in Legal Limbo Wired News - The judge said eBay, the world's largest online auction site , was acting within the law because it removed auctions from the jeweler's counterfeited goods ...
04 Dec 2008 23:28:36

Facebook to allow users to share info with outside sites - Chicago Tribune

BBC News Facebook to allow users to share info with outside sites Chicago Tribune, United States - By Wailin Wong Tribune staff reporter Facebook is allowing any outside Web site to participate in a service in which the social networking site's members ... Facebook Pushes New Service Why Facebook Connect wins Facebook Connect goes live to one and all -
04 Dec 2008 23:06:02

Young workers' access to social networking sites a concern for ... - San Jose Mercury News

Young workers' access to social networking sites a concern for ... San Jose Mercury News, USA - By Steve Johnson Social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are being targeted so often by cyber-crooks and other mischief-makers that half of the ...

Keywords: