Want Some Free Money ?

This post was inspired by a conversation I had with a non-native english speaker over on IRC.

The basic problem for affiliate marketers is “impressions.” You need to get as many impressions as possible. Once you have a lot of impressions, your percentages for click-through-rates are more reliable, which leads to your conversion rate percentages being more reliable. The first thing you need to worry about is impressions.

People succeed at PPC because they’re paying for impressions. If you don’t want to pay for impressions, (and this is the important part), you’ll need to get them some other way.

Since he was looking for “free money,” my suggestion to him was that he get a blogspot.com blog; note that in this case I’m not encouraging wordpress.com. WordPress (hosted) blogs don’t allow you to add advertising. With a blogspot blog, you can “edit the template” and insert a html or javascript snippet. This is where you can add advertising.

So, get a blogspot blog, add some advertising, and then figure out how to divert traffic to it.

What I suggested to him was that he write some fabulous, kick ass content, or post boobs, and submit it to digg and reddit and fark. There are two main problems with this approach. First, I suspect his content will get lost in the flood; he was a non-native speaker, and it may have been difficult to connect with his audience (unless he posts his boobs). The second problem with this is that fark, digg and reddit traffic doesn’t convert well. However, this is still true. Compelling content to get your users to your site, getting the eyeballs actually on the page, and then watching the impressions->click ratio and the click->purchase ratio.

Written by russ on February 22nd, 2009 with no comments.
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