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Why Some People Get Affiliate Referrals So Easy

by Melvin · Nov 23, 2008

Most of you here are bloggers and when you started months ago or even until today you place some affiliate links on your blog. On the sidebar, maybe in posts or in footers/headers. But well to be honest, I’m sure we’re all not getting the referrals we thought we could get when we were starting out. The truth about it is that you will really get low conversions on referrals and thats the bitter truth about it. People nowadays, because of information overload or maybe what you can call it, have become skeptic on things like these. Not so long ago you can do a review of something w/your affiliate link and have people jump on the bandwagon immediately. But then its different now.

Saying it doesn’t mean you can’t do anything about it. 🙂 Of course there are ways to increase affiliate earnings from your blog. This is different so to speak with the whole affiliate marketing but I believe affiliate links on blogs can itself buy you a shirt and shoes every month. W/o further adieu, here are the tips:

Don’t make them sign, if you yourself haven’t made money w/it. – this is mostly the case a lot of people don’t get. Ok they’ve read this program pays $10 per signup, then they sign w/it, promote the program itself and say to their readers “this program is great and you should try” but the real reason is that it gets them $10 which I feel is cheap. I believe if you can show people your account or how you’ve fared w/them, then you can more likely encourage them to sign up under you. Like here, you’ve seen me made some posts w/pepperjamnetwork. Apart from me getting nearly $20 on every posts of it, is that I really make money w/them even outside this blog( and bigger amount). They’ve had some nice dating offers and I had a lot of campaigns w/them before so I promote them. Show proofs!
Have a Nice Rep First – As I’ve said earlier, its hard to make tons referrals from blogs. But make no mistake w/guys like Zac Johnson and some other big affiliate bloggers. I mean Zac is earning a thousand dollars from affiliate earnings from his blog alone! Why? Because he’s a super affiliate! Its the human psychology that when they see someone making a lot with something, they tend to think that hopefully they can too w/the same program the person is using. And I believe Zac uses a lot of affiliate networks to make a living so just guess how many people signs on almost all program under him. Again it helps for you to have a great rep first.
Be transparent and honest – Wth my ancient post about whether you are signing under aff.links or not, I mentioned that if it really gives out value, then I signed through the link. I mean the guy who showed me that must be compensated for the thing right? Most people want to cloak links, mask them and try to look it natural. But I got to differ. I am a big believer that people don’t care if its an affiliate link or not. Some bloggers even say, that the certain link is an affiliate link. If you have the former 2 things mentioned above, I dont see the need for not being transparent.

This blog hasn’t really made thousands of affiliate referrals every month. But then for me to see it makes hundreds and see people saying “I will sign under you” is something that makes me feel well. Not all that worked for me will work for them and I know by being too good to be true and to honest w/my posts, they understand it well.

Blogger Head To Head Round 4; It’s The Kids, This Time

by Melvin · Nov 19, 2008

Not really I am a big fan of long titles but well the part 4 of the blogger head to head has already come. This time the kids teenagers will take the centerstage. Not only they are young kids, but they are young and competitive boys out there who are not afraid with jumping into the online world. Rajaie is a guy from Rajaietalks which I believe has taken his blog into the next level w/his killer posts as well as hardcore tactics to increase his backlinks and gain readers as well. Ganesh on the flipside, from Blogsmartly is as impressive. He’s been busy w/school now but his presence is always felt with his comments and useful insights.

Anyway enough with the praises from me and let’s jump to their interesting tack on things.

	Rajaie	Ganesh
Describe yourself in less than 5 words?	Humble, Friendly, Adventurous, and Outgoing	studious kid with a taste for books and computers.
What is your favorite breakfast?	Some eggs, bacon, sausages, and waffles. On normal days I like to have some	Idly and Sambar (its the common breakfast in South India)
Why did you choose a saturated niche?	At the time I started blogging, I didn’t have the slightest clue of what a niche was! Hehe, but I could say that I chose this niche because I enjoy blogging about it	There were so many blogs giving blogging tips. But most of them wrote and re-wrote the same old content. I wanted to start a blog that gave smart tips on how to blog. I wanted to write content which would really be useful to the readers.
Any story behind choosing that domain name?	To be honest, I actually forgot why I chose www.rajaietalks.com for my blog. I guess it had something to do with me just talking about anything I had in mind.	I wanted a domain that instantly made it clear to the visitor that this wasn’t just any ordinary blog. 😉
How many uniques are you getting monthly?	It varies between every month. In September, I got over 60,000 uniques, but last month I got about 6,000+.	Around 500.
How many hours do you spend with it?	I actually spend hours and hours a day online, but less than 2 hours blogging. I’ve been trying to focus on my blog mostly these past few weeks, but I always seem to be distracted by other things online.	When I first started blogging, I used to spend long hours. Now, I usually spend 2-3 hours everyday blogging.
Do you read other blogs feeds? How many do you track?	Of course! 🙂 About fifteen or so, I try to keep it to a minimum so I don’t spend too much time reading other blogs instead of doing actual work.	I don’t use the feed reader. I prefer receiving updates via email. I subscribe to around 10-15 blogs.
How do you split your time with school and blogging and being a son?	Ahhh, this is a hard one. I try my best to finish my studies and homework before surfing the Internet. But no matter how hard I try to finish early, it just seems as though there is never enough time on my hands!	Ah! That’s a bit difficult. Since school and studies take up almost 12 hours daily, I usually spend 3 hours in the evenings and 1 hour in the morning for my blogs. As for my other activities like playing sports, games, reading, etc. I do them on weekends.
Any other ventures aside from blogging?	No, not the moment. But once I can figure out a schedule that will help me maintain my blog and keep up with life, I am planning on jumping into affiliate marketing, site flipping, and whatever else I seem to find interesting	I’m currently exploring microblogging sites like twitter and plurk. I’m planning on building sites that aren’t as time-consuming as blogging.
What makes your blog unique from others?	It’s written by me	I really put a lot of work and planning into my posts, so I guess I write unique (and perhaps enjoyable) posts. And there’s also the fact that I’m 14 which creates some buzz around the blogosphere.
What’s the biggest goal for this blog?	To become one of the top “make money online” blogs that actually teaches its readers how to make money online	I want to build up a large subscriber base and provide useful and top-notch content for all of my readers. That’s my biggest goal.
Give me a blog you admire and why?	Copyblogger. I simply love it because of the awesome style of writing Brian and the other authors have	ProBlogger. Because Darren gives some of the best tips on blogging and his blog shows that it is possible to make a living out of blogging. His blog was a big inspiration for me to start Blog Smartly.

Make More Money This Christmas

by Melvin · Nov 14, 2008

With just about 40+ days before Christmas, I know some of you are now starting to save and try to earn more money for the holiday. I’m sure we have a lot of things to buy, and gift give to this Christmas. As December comes in, I expect the malls here in the Philippines to give massive discounts on some gadgets and shirts and every gift related to Christmas. Of course, I also do expect it to be saturated quickly as people are extremely fast especially with discounted items.

Like you, I have also 1 million reasons to make more money now. Gifts for my family, foods for the holidays, date with the girl I care, and of course stuffs to buy for myself. Right now I am really working hard in it because I was close to zero (my debit card and paypal) when November started. Anyway, today I will unveil the things I do to make more money for myself this Christmas. Be sure to give out your own tips to me too. 🙂

Holiday Offers (Affiliate Marketing) – as all of you know, affiliate marketing is my bread and butter. Although it seems like I always lose big money every time I try to grow my campaigns, I always keep on trying. Look holiday-related offers from your network and be sure to take good advantage of them. I have purchased up several domains as well as sites just specifically for the Christmas season.
Catching up with the Minimum Payout – Well yesterday I do a quick roundup of sites/networks that I have seemed to forgot that I am using. I have found out I have $47 on my WidgetBucks account and $44 on Clickbooth (sites that both have a minimum payout of $50). I have moved some of my campaigns from Copeac to Clickbooth just to make it pass the minimum or better to get over $100. I also still have some unpaid revenue from Popuptraffic.com but they don’t seem to respond to my emails (I’m close to filing a legal case to them)
Forum Posting – Again, this is what I turned into during the days i need startup income. I have a four hour internet class during Saturdays and I believe the only time we take to discuss and do machine problems is 2 hours. If you type as quick as me you can immediately make $20 an hour with it. Head on to forumsfirst now to try your luck w/it.
Save Money Offline – Well again this is the hardest part I am doing right now. I used to spend more than what my parents give me so this is really a tough challenge. But well I did have 3 ft coin bank in which I started filling it out w/$0.3 – $1 a day since October. I hope to get surprised when I open it this December.
Firing people – LOL. Well I do have some writers for my other blog and some coders and some psd creators. Because God doesn’t bless me w/those talents, I have to outsource and hire. They are compensated based on what my certain site makes for a month. Now I am firing them all and is planning to retain them early next year. Hope to save some moolah then! 😉

Again these are what I am doing to make more money this holiday, I hope I gave some ideas that could be well-pondering for anyone. Like what I’ve said, I’m interested to know your take w/it and give your own ways too. Maybe I can do it too! 🙂

Making Noise With Zip And Email Submits

by Melvin · Nov 8, 2008

LOL… I got tired of titles with “make money online” phrase types so lets use a different one. So probably a lot of you mostly kids have never ever made a thought of jumping into affiliate marketing because of its big risk. Well I don’t want to do it too before and I just kinda started because I think I have earned about $450-$600 online then with different methods so basically I just had the startup income.

As days pass by and more and more people are jumping w/making money online, some people can say that it became more competitive and saturated as well and no doubt its true. But I can say that it has become a lot easier nowadays. Just look at email and zip submits. There are offers paying $7+ for an email and while $7 is not that big, its certainly huge for an email. The great thing about promoting zip and email submits is the fact that its a low risk type. Maybe you couldn’t make 20 million in a year w/it but certainly it doesn’t take much effort on how to do it. And also there are a lot of instructions there that I have read and I believe has done a great job of really teaching people how to do it. Anyway here’s a screen shot of how I did it with Copeac(It’s not a big amount, anyway…)

If you’re out trying to learn the circles of affiliate marketing then try email and zip submits. I mean a lot of advertisers and affiliate companies are slowly embracing it and wherever you go there’s always this type of offer. But anyway Im using Copeac with it and well there’s no harm on trying their network. 🙂

I Used To Have Three Mice For My PC

by Melvin · Nov 4, 2008

So I did have three mouses mice for my desktop computer. You might be wondering why, the answer is its because some of them are not functioning on some days and some of them does. It’s weird because I do believe that all of them are of a great quality, one is an old school mouse (I love old school mouse), the other one is laser and the last one is wireless. All of them are installed on startup and the wireless one seems to be the highest priority among all.

Anyway, I have won a lot of contest again for the last month. Some were affiliate marketing challenges and some other were just basically the mainstream contests wherein you’ll just need to subscribe via feed and maybe comment on some posts. Although, its not really that of a big value of money I still do appreciate it a lot. I’m slowly realizing there’s life in contests. 🙂 Also I was deeply in debt right now or not really. The Pay Per Click Campaigns we’ve had in the last month were not converting well. There was a stretch wherein we were losing $150 a day I think for 6 straight days. Of course its not just solely because of Pay Per Click, it’s a mixture of everything. Just have to call it quits this month and take time to think more and also ponder on how to spend the money more wisely.

I also have the list of the last months top commentator and well I will email them for their junk surprise prizes/incentives for commenting to my blog. Again finally I have transfered my Basketball Nonsense blog from blogspot to wordpress. It wasn’t 100 successful because comments were not imported mainly because early this year I have changed the commenting system to Intense Debate which wordpress doesn’t support for the mean time. It’s a tough decision because that blog is memorable to me. It’s how I started with blogging and I think blogspot played a vital role in it in guiding me from being stupid to being an intermediate user right now. But then blogspot I think is getting pissed now on how I overly customize my blog so I need more room to it.

And lastly the NBA season has begun and oh well, look Allen Iverson is now traded to Detroit Pistons for Chauncey Billups! Interesting season to watch, wht do you think?

Why Teens Should Try Making Money By Now

by Melvin · Nov 1, 2008

A lot of times, people credit me and say “You’re young and still in school yet you’re making your own money”. Of course I feel good and flattered upon hearing that and I say thank you deep from my heart. 🙂 On some other days, some of my friends are curious telling me why I am trying to make money. They say I don’t really need to and maybe its hurting my studies. Most of the times I just respond to it and say I wanted to buy a shirt with my own money. 😉

Obviously that’s a lame reason and not true. But then I think, I have one thousand reasons why I should try and make money now (online and offline). I know there are a lot of kids right now jumping heads first into making money online. Of course they have come to realize its not as easy as playing PSP or anything. With regards to this topic I always wanted to put up a list on why we, teens or kids should try making money by now. Here are my goats:

Helping your parents – Each and every of my friends know we are not a rich family. Although, we are never hurting financially, there are times wherein my parents just got everything that we need to spend. The point here is that, sometimes you can pay or buy something w/o annoying your parents for financial help. I’m not sure how you can relate to this but I think its a big and understandable reason.
Experience, nevertheless – Obviously there’s nothing in this world that can replace experience. Most people fail and still pursue and thats for experience. It’s your teacher and whatever you may want to call it. Most successful millionaires here in Philippines started out flat and crappy. They gained experience, learned from it and then applied what they learned. Now they are successful! It’s also an edge against everyone to have that experience in your belt.
Pride – I have talked about it a lot before with my friends. I did say I get complement from a lot of my relatives with it and to be honest it damn feel good! I am a pridey guy. I take pride in a lot of things. I take pride that I can buy shirts and gadgets w/o asking for help, I take pride that I am having transactions with bigger and more established marketers, and I take pride receiving checks day in and day out! It sounds arrogant but pride is what lights my butt to work harder! and I don’t want my pride to get hurt.
Emergency purposes – Imagine you had sex w/your crush or maybe your girlfriend. You had your sperm inside her and she got preggy! Now unless abortion is your religion then you having your own money can make things a lil better. In life there are a lot of things that we don’t expect. A lot of things that we don’t expect to bury our pockets. Having that little earnings from Adsense surely can help in case of hard times.
For Holidays – Halloween had just passed by and next is Christmas and New Year! Everytime you talk about holiday, you gotta to talk about shopping and buying gifts. I don’t feel actually the essence of buying gift for a friend using the money from your parents. How can you do it yourself? Start filling that coin bank now!

This is talking about making money in general, both online and offline. Not many kids and teens today take interest on trying their luck with online business or saving money. And I feel this is what makes us stand out from the rest. Of course the purpose varies. What do you think is yours?