Affiliate Marketing

Most of you are already aware of affiliate programs for webmasters. If you're not, go check out the wiki article on them. Now that that we're all on the same page, let's talk about how to make them work for you. I've been playing this game since 2000, and have found success and dismal failure. In some senses this is all a black art full of mistique. I've found some straightforward tips that I've used to simply it all. I'll go over that here.

My Background

I've been at this game since 2000, quite by accident. Honestly, I ran a web site as a hobby and because I had a distain for ad banners, pop ups, and web marketing in general, I stayed far away from it. Eventually, it found me.

I ran an internet game league as a hobby. I love one particular classic board game (which I won't mention here) and started playing at a free game site. Another player told me about free leagues, where players on that site compete in formal tournaments. I joined one of these leagues and thought it was a great idea, but poorly run by a teenager. I was in my mid 30's and decided I could do a better job so I launched my own league. Within a couple of years that league grew to be the largest game league on the internet with over 8,000 members worldwide and tournaments every half hour around the clock. As you can imagine running this league wasn't an easy task and took a team of volunteers.

One fateful day, the site where we played the game suddenly, without warning dropped the game. POOF, a league without a place to play. My email box filled up with panicy messages from loyal (perhaps addicted) players. "OMG, what do we do now!?", "Where will we play?". I did some research and found some alternatives, but none seems to really meet our needs. So, after a weeks consideration, much to the dismay of the tournament directors and players, I disbanded the league.

I was left with a website with no purpose. I built my own web site to host the league years before, and had prepaid for hosting and the domain registration for a decade. I created the league using a popular league site to maintain statistics, create and manage tournaments, generate pairings, etc., But I hated the layout and limitations of that site. So I created my own site with the features the members wanted, and used <FRAMES> to tap into the league site features. Now, after disbanding the league, that site had no purpose. To address the thousands of emails I got every day, I posted a FAQ on the site explaining that the league was gone and why. Perhaps more importantly, I described how and where interested people could play on the internet. Over a few weeks I wrote a dozen articles and that was that.

The site sat dormant for a year or so when I got an e-mail from a young girl. It said simply, "Your site sucks!" I had to agree, it did suck. Feeling guilty, I found Mambo (now Joomla) an open source Content Management System (CMS). It was, and still is, free to use, and made the job of building and maintaining a website much easier than playing with html code. I used it out of the box, with a free template (look and feel) ported the content over and launched the new site. I installed a few cool components, one of which showed me statistics and information about my visitors.

I never realized it before, but looking over the statistics, I was getting thousands of visitors each day. It really struck me as odd, since the site really did "suck", and the league itself had been down for a couple of years. Why on earth were so many people visiting this site? I put on my investigator's cap and started checking it all out. It seems that while the league had been operating hundreds of sites tossed up links recommending the site as a great place to go. The information up there, was real, informative and helpful. Put these two facts together and Google ranked me on the first page for several very high volume search phrases. In several cases, my site was number one.

One thing I noticed when configuring the CMS was a small ad banner at the top of the page. I was never one to pollute my site with all those ugly, distracting ad banners, but hey if I did it in a subtle way maybe I could make a few bucks from those thousands of visitors.. So I poked around the web and stumbled on a few affiliate programs. I joined them, hey, why not it was free. I tossed up a few banners and didn't make a penny. After a few years of experimenting, learning hard lessons, I've turned that and several other sites into a respectable income.

Lessons Learned

Over the years since I started playing this game, I've made and lost money. In a sense it's like playing Black Jack. If you just toss down your chips and randomly make plays eventually you will lose your shirt. If you learn proper Black Jack play, you'll lose at a much slower rate. If you learn how to count cards, you'll probably break even. But if you practice counting, money management, proper play and remain focused you can make a lot. Sure, I lucked out with a high rankings on Google. Still that rank has slipped over the years and I had to work very hard to move it back up and maintain it. I'm one guy, working against full time SEO gurus.

More to come soon!