I want to write a quick post just to portray how and what my AM (affiliate marketing) journey has looked like so far. To be honest, it’s been pretty conservative. I’m pretty wary of people telling me I can make x amount of money in just a few days and I’ve sort of had tunnel vision and not experimented with anything too crazy over the last year. I’ve learned the good from the bad though. I also want to write a recap post on Affiliate Summit West (which was awesome!) and that’ll be coming up next.

So,

December 2008- Many of you who are seasoned AM’ers are going to cringe when you hear Clickbank but that’s how I started.I had had a Clickbank account  for quite a while and it sat idle until December of 2008. That’s when I signed up to Wealthy Affiliate – an online university that aims to teach mostly newbies how to make money online through affiliate marketing, although a main focus of the site was teaching people how to sell digital products, i.e., ebooks. This worked for a while and I created my first landing page. Realized it was horrible and outsourced it. From there on I did some PPC and lost money. Then I let things sit for a good amount of time and didn’t really touch anything AM related. Revisited this product again in September 2008. That’s when I really started my AM journey.

September 2008 – January 2009
So this was my semester off of school. The three months I had to make it big in affiliate marketing and get to those dream numbers? Did it happen? Not exactly. But I did make progress. In Sept-Oct. I wrote tons of articles and tried to rank highly in the search engines for my keywords for the Clickbank product I was still promoting. By November, I was making $600 a month in profit. By December, it was $800 in profit. I started PPC again, however, as I got sick of writing articles and wanted to expand my campaigns. I didn’t abandon article marketing completely though – hired someone for $200 to submit my 60 articles to about 40 different article directories. I then started PPC. I got tons of leads as I started a list, a high quality score campaign. However, something happened. Conversions just dipped. The money I was making before just wasn’t coming in anymore. I used to convert at 1:15. Now it’s 1:50. I have no idea what happened. I’m still promoting that clickbank offer just because of how much work I’ve put into it, but have dramatically lowered my bids to a safe place. I’ve realized that…perhaps Clickbank works for other people…but it definitely isn’t working for me anymore.

I had been doing leads on and off since May 2008. However, it is only after signing up for PPC Coach as well as Affiliate Summit West that I decided that this is where I want to focus. I haven’t been able to get any hugely successful campaigns off the ground at the moment. In fact some days I’m losing $100-200. I’m going to keep going and putting up those campaigns though, because I know that it will click at some point. I will be having those $500-$1000 profit days no doubt. It may take me longer than I expected, but I will get there. Now that I’m back in school, I have less time to devote to AM, but I can’t keep myself away from it. I hope to reach these numbers by May 2009.

Other future goals

• Finish business school. Yes it’s not really my favorite place to be at the moment, but I’m committed to it.
• Be making at least $500 a day in profit by Affiliate Summit East.
• Learn to love the education I’m getting no matter how useful I deem it. Not many people get the same chance and I need to realize and appreciate that. One is only in college for so long.
• Study abroad in Fall 2009.
• Travel after graduation.
• Live in Manhattan for a year after graduating.
• Live in Austin for a year.
• Meet other like-minded people inside and outside of this industry.
• Continue to build new campaigns.