Help: Coming back to affiliate marketing after failing.

Yeah I agree, move on ! Forget about it. We all have been thru it. Maybe not the exact circumstance. But we have all felt the pain one way or the other.

I had 3 straight years of killing it with Adsense and putting in 2 to 3 hours of month with an article here and there. Total cake.

Then Google updates came two years ago and wiped all Adsense earnings and CPA income down to just about zero.

I tried to get back with SEO and worked on that for over a year.

I said 'eff' it and just moved forward and now make money on ways where I have to rely squat on the big G for Traffic.

There are just so many ways to make Money without doing SEO and without relying on Google.


John, become independent of this Behemoth and you will set your biz and yourself
FREE

As far as learning more about Affiliate Marketing ? Id try here http://affiliatebully.com/. Some good stuff !

Thanks for the kinds words and encouragement. I really do appreciate it. This can be a really tough road.

It seems there's a recommendation to generally avoid AdSense/Google. If that's the case, can someone please expand on this? I mean, I can see the danger of dealing with such a totalitarian organisation with no recognizable form of customer service. So, I get that part.

Is the philosophy of warriors to favor affiliate type work rather than to try and rely on advertising with the likes of AdSense?

Why put all your eggs in 1 basket from a company that can drop you anytime they please?

you mean AdWords? The only philosophy warriors on here have is to diversify your streams of income and not lean toward only one source. As far as favoring "affiliate type work" NO, each warrior does stuff there own way, It's just that Affiliate marketing is a huge topic. There are many warriors who haven't sold any affiliate stuff and still making excellent money online. It's what you know and how you market it that makes you the money. Not following the "everyone's doing it" parade.

Best of Luck to you Out here
Eric

So...is the reason I see so much advise on WF to engage in list building precisely that you isolate yourself from these kinds of issues?

I actually have an email list of about 12,000 to 16,000 people from a prior hardware business I was in. I would imagine chunks of it are stale. I'll guess 25% to 50% of it is useless. I was actually thinking of creating an information product targeted at the average inhabitant of this industry segment and using this old list (about four years old) to try and launch it. Good idea?

Can someone point me to a good thread covering email marketing? I am interested in tools, best practices and the general care and feeding of the beast.

Back when I had a hardware manufacturing business (that's a whole other story) we used services such as Constant Contact to reach out to our list with offers, news and trade-show announcements. I forget what pricing looked like for CC. Is this the kind of service email marketeers use or do you send emails directly from your own servers to your opt-in list?

Thanks!

Thanks for the encouragement. Once I feel a little smarter about this I'll take you up on the offer to have a chat off-list.

Thanks.

That's exactly the way I'm starting to think now Sarevok.

In the past I've spent hours analysing trends/keywords/search volume etc. and all at the expense of adding decent content to my site or blog.

I'm not saying I won't do this type of research again, I just don't believe it should be the major part of your strategy!

Paying less and less attention to google these days and the traffic keeps increasing :rolleyes:

Cheers

Jon Crimes

That whole thing is great advise. SEO seems like a constant headache to please the Google gods. What you are saying is: Make something people want.

Thanks.

I appreciate the encouragement. This community so far comes off as being really friendly and supportive of newcomers. This is great.

Thanks.

I just love that perspective. Thanks!

What do you mean by this? I ask because at some level Google's entire AdWords business is about ad arbitrage, isn't it?

Agreed.

The problem is that, at least three years go, Google didn't have a sensible way to onboard new customers. They probably still don't have a way to teach you the do's and don'ts of AdSense.

What I mean is that it would be far more productive to let you experiment and have you earn nothing until you get it right. Whacking someone with a totalitarian shutdown, and with no recourse at all, simply isn't sensible. This is particularly true when someone is obviously just getting started.

They could easily provide you with real-time feedback over email as things develop. You get an email saying "Ads are now turned off because you don't have a terms-of-service page". You fix that. Next, "Ads are now turned off because we did not find contact information". You fix that. Etc.

I get that they have to deal with piles of scam artists. I get it. The problem is that in doing so they unfairly and brutally punish those of us who are honest entrepreneurs trying to learn.

Let's put it this way, after a thirty year career in real life brick-and-mortar business it was, to some degree, insulting to be shutdown like that and have no way to engage with a human being to understand what went wrong and how to fix it. Serious business people do it that way. Not saying Google isn't serious. I am saying that some of the things the company does, their attitude and approach to customers tends to reveal a somewhat adolescent and socially naive approach to business, which is exactly what you'd expect from 20-somethings devoid of real-world business experience.

I mean, can you imagine throwing a switch and shutting down someone's entire business overnight in the real world? Let's say a grocery. Imagine their main supplier stops delivery of goods because they don't like the sign in front of the store. There would be tons of communication before that even remotely happened. That's real business.

When you have to engage people in real life to make a sale, work with vendors, suppliers, customers, build relationships and shake a few hands to close deals you gain a very different perspective. Sitting in front of a computer working on algorithms all day and seeing bad actors trying to game your algorithms probably skews your world view and, it is no surprise, the "Google way" is what inevitably comes out.