Affiliate blog philosophy

You may be green, working in a green niche, perhaps because you have green thumbs, but as greenhorns go you appear ahead of the curve, which, you never know, may incline the average greenhorn to be green with envy. I'm impressed, and I can give many of your ideas the green light. Let me just see if I can shed some (sun) light. Help you earn some of the green stuff.

• Niche. The niche, general or micro, can never be chosen in isolation. So, any specific advice you receive in this regard should be ignored, unless of course someone has done their homework, unlikely, and hands you on a platter (or a pitchfork) a well-researched green niche. A decade ago, people like myself would rank niche mini sites, based around an EMD (exact match domain), typically with 20 pages of content, and would then never give the site a second thought. It would generate passive income, and, depending on the associated keywords it ranked for, a lot or a little each day. Times change. Or I should say, human expectations and Google change. Nowadays, far more important than optimizing for a handful of related keywords, you need to setup website properties that endeavour to achieve 2 primary goals: to provide relevant information on a topic or related topics that is perceived as being exemplary information in the eyes of people and Google, and do so in an ongoing manner. Now, in less formal terms, how can you decide on the niche in question? You need to consider the intended audience and the current platter (or garden) of websites that aim to satisfy them. Ask yourself: Can you do better? The biggest mistake I see newbies making is to forget the most obvious consideration. The consideration being: Why should Joe, a chap with an avid interest in all things green, for example, be interested in your intended website? Look around you, OP. The very same mistake is being made right before your eyes. When you click on a signature file and get whisked away to a one-page squeeze, where the owner of said squeeze is enticing you onto his list with the ridiculous promise of easy money, do you feel, honestly feel, that you have not seen this page 10,000 times before? The owner, the "expert," is making the newbie mistake. Don't you make it. Plan this business. And the plan starts by understanding your intended audience and, thus, endeavouring to plan-out a venture that will offer them something unique and special and worthwhile.
• Assets. On day One, start building your assets. Or aim to. As online marketers, we receive our traffic from a heady assortment of locations: search engines, socials, forums, from Cythnia who hurls our flyers at drunk students in the nearest frat house. But the problem? We do not own those locations. We therefore have questionable control over them. Yet again, going back some years now, asset building amounted to expanding our reach into search engines, encouraging bookmarkers, developing traffic trades (with a script, if you were adept at it), and, yes, growing the almighty List. Times change, as we've seen. Engage in those elements, certainly, but also concentrate your efforts on socials and owned-platforms; Wordpress subscribers; groups (buddypress, for instance); forums (BBPress, vBulletin, for instance); and whatever else allows you to achieve what I'm about to mention next. You need to collect your audience. That is true online business growth; not a growth of monthly views to your Youtube or Vimeo or Dailymotion videos; not a growth of Google traffic to your carefully-selected longtails. True growth is the collection of targeted audience-members on platforms that you either own or control; the former being the better, safer option.
• Monetization. I like to collect things other than people (that makes me sound rather sinister) and one of those things is movie memorabilia. Recently, I purchased some signed, first edition comics, based on a favourite book which, later, became a favourite movie. I was disappointed with my purchase. In the comic world, you have grading (to learn more watch Comic Book Men; in fact, watch it just for a good laugh). These comics? They did not possess the advertised grading. I ended up keeping them (couldn't be bothered to screw around) but I will never return to the vendor who sold them. The trust is gone. I'm sure what I'm saying isn't lost on you, either. Monetizing an online business is far more complex than merely adding adverts to sidebars and tossing around contextual links. In brief (big subject), know this: the day you allow your audience to encounter, through yourself, an inferior offer (of any sort) is the day you need to walk out into your garden, pick up a spade, and mercilessly hammer away at your private parts. Theory being: you won't make the same mistake again.

The above will help, but you need to continue helping yourself, and continue being smart:

Learn from others, but never follow the herd.

- Tom

Glad to help; you catch me on a weekend in which I appear to be dividing my time between Sandra Bullock movies and antique shopping. Both of which are an absolute joy, of course, which means my decision to temporarily let my wife delight in those pursuits without my company, and instead throw the odd piece of advice your way, is purely altruistic. Nonetheless, I don't mind helping, at all.

Monetization. In general terms: promote products and services of exemplary quality. Let's say you have Marketer A and Marketer B, both of whom have a list of 50,000 subscribers. Marketer A convinces a subscriber, Joe, to purchase a CB product, earning that marketer $50. The product stinks and Joe will never purchase another product from Marketer A. On the other hand, you have Marketer B, who convinces David to purchase a CB product that manages to achieve for David exactly what this marketer promised, earning that marketer $50, as well. Next month, Marketer A futilely promotes another product to Joe. Joe flips a certain finger in the virtual direction of Marketer A. In the very same month, David receives an email from Marketer B, and considers taking the marketer's advice to be a "no brainer," earning that marketer another $50. In the space of 12 months, Marketer A earns a mere $50 from each of his subscribers who take action on his promotions; Marketer B, on the other hand, earns $600, which appears to be just enough money to enable his wife to spend $10,000 a month on antiques, give or take $10,000. (No, my own wife isn't quite that adept at antique shopping.)

Earning. The best policy, OP, is to promote what you know, where what you know is known to do what is says on the tin. If you can't buy the product or service yourself? (Which is the ideal.) Do your due dilligence. Research. At this stage in your IM career, you must understand that the odds are stacked against you. Almost every newbie is going to fail. IM is hard. IM requires creativity, along with many other basic requirements of the job. But, having read your two posts now, and having read between the lines, I would say you have an above average chance of success. You need to avoid aiming for perfection, and understand that you will never attain it; avoid over-thinking, because it often hinders us from taking efficient action; and you need to keep things simple for now: a quality site, good monetization, good asset building platforms, one traffic method. Master the one traffic method; introduce another. Earn just 1 sale. You do that? It means your system works. And if you can get 1 sale, you can get a million.

- Tom

Thank you sir, I appreciate your advice.

-Capo

Good lord, peeps. I refuse to indulge in this Thread until you two do some proper paragraph and sentence separation as my eyes are getting cross eyed

Tom, you should no better