One of the most common questions I get as a coach is people asking me for the “secret” to making money from their Blogs.

One of the first things I always teach my students is that if they want to make money from their Blogs, they need to learn to treat their Blog like a business – not a joke.

I see people who are willing to invest $300 to go out drinking with their buddies, but they won’t invest $10 into a proper domain or hosting for their Blog.  They’ll invest 20 hours a week watching their favorite shows on TV, but they won’t invest 3-4 hours a week into writing content.  They’ll jump off the couch and scream with passion when their favorite football team scores a touchdown, but they’ll have no passion for their own business.

If you really want to build an online business – regardless whether you do that as a Blogger or an Affiliate Marketer or any of the other many ways of making money online – you really need to start treating your business like a business.

If you were the “boss” of your own business, would you be willing to pay someone else $3,000/month for the same work you’ve put in last month into your business?  If not, then how do you expect to ever make that much from your business?

If you look at the last 90 days of “work” you’ve done towards your Blog / online business, and imagined someone else doing that same amount of work for you – would you fire them?

Be honest with yourself – do you treat your Blog/Online Business like a business, or are you treating it like a joke?

Do you have a budget for your online business?

Does your budget include a re-investment of earnings into marketing?

Do you have an accounting / administration budget?

If you paid $400,000 for your Blog / business, would you treat it with more respect?

Blogs and online businesses are very easy to start with very minimal costs (like $0), which presents people with a great opportunity to start a business with very minimal costs, but at the same time because of their low investment they are also very easy to ignore and treat like a joke – rather than like a business.

If you treat your Blog like a joke, so will everyone else.  If you really want to start making money online, it’s time to step things up a few levels and to start treating your online business like a business.

I know you’ve heard this before.  So have I.  I didn’t treat my Blog as a business for a long time, and my earnings online reflected that.  Then one day I made some changes and I started looking at my Blog as a real business.  I started treating it with respect and it started respecting me.

From time to time I still get caught in the trap of not taking my Blog seriously and it begins to suffer, until I realize what I’m doing and make the necessary changes.  That’s the one downside of being your own boss – because you never have the worry that you’re going to get fired if you don’t get the job done, you turn into a slacker.

Here are two simple ways to avoid falling into that trap:

1. Set some simple, achievable and measurable goals for yourself and then hold yourself accountable to them.  Set a deadline for them and use a punishment/reward system to help you stay on track.
2. Hire a coach or mentor to hold you accountable to your goals.  The right coach/mentor can work wonders for self-employed entrepreneurs.  You get all the benefits of being accountable to someone without all the downsides of having a “real” boss breathing down your neck.

I normally start with #1 and give myself a deadline for achieving my goal.  If I can’t reach the goal in the specific time line I’ll hire a coach / mentor to help me reach my goals.

One way or another you’ll have to experience the discipline of being part of a business somewhere.  It will either be within your own business as a self-disciplined entrepreneur, or as an employee working for someone else who has the self-discipline to run a business.

It’s totally up to you which you prefer.

A lot of you guys may easily notice this. Most of the famous and popular bloggers do have one thing in common, they have a compelling story to tell. They leverage that story and what ends up happening  is that people start following them and consider them as an authority.

The make money online blogging hype has gone down a bit for the past few years. I remembered way back 2007 where almost every new make money blog was started every second just because of how people were told it’s a goldmine. Obviously, it isn’t and right now people started realizing it. They either quit blogging about that topic or moved to a different industry like freelancing or affiliate marketing.

A lot of people don’t realize this when starting their own blog but the days where you can start a blog as an experiment and go out as you were learning is long over. People have gotten tired of hearing the same shit all over and over again. I guess that people realized there’s really no point of following someone try and make money while doing it with no experience whatsoever.

There are over a billion blogs right now and hundreds of thousands talking on the same topic so the chances of us, getting noticed doing blogging from scratch is almost nil. As a reader can we really consume 100 blogs about technology? no! People follow blogs for a reason and if you don’t fit into that, you’re not gonna get read.

What’s your Story?

Back to the question above, do you know that almost all bloggers got popular not because they’re bloggers but because they have good stories to tell? It’s surprising not a lot of bloggers realize this. In this niche, bloggers like shoemoney, yaro starak, and many others don’t really blog for the sake of getting popular blogging. Instead they leveraged their story and that started getting perceived as tons of good value for their readers. The result? they’re experts now.

And how about the owner of this blog Tyler? Well if you’re following him for quite some time you would see that he used to be making a lot of money brokering domain. Now that is an experience that he used to build this blog. Apart from that Tyler also does affiliate marketing, and manage lots of content-related websites and forums. That experience puts people from ordinary bloggers to authority.

Stories really are a good way to catch people’s attention since it adds that personal touch (voyeurism) that surprisingly most bloggers don’t focus doing. Intercepting that fine line between credibility, experience (being qualified to talk) and good skills of presenting that story to the majority is an absolute recipe for success.

Marketers didn’t Invent Story-telling, they just perfected it

This is an uber famous statement from one of the books of Seth Godin. I’m sure if you’re into this niche you can relate to it a lot. A lot of the super famous internet marketers like Frank Kern, John Reese, Rich Schefren and etc. are making so much money because they tell good stories! Im not saying their lying but it depends on how you look into it.

Im not a marketer, I’m a blogger. Sure you are and I am too but as we get more and more into this information-overload era, the line between a blogger and a marketer becomes thinner. I mean all these rich-ass bloggers don’t really make money blogging, they make money selling. Either it’s their product, or a private forum or other people’s product, it doesn’t take a lot to see that in order to succeed as a blogger, you have to pitch yourself well, you have to market competently, and of course you have to tell good stories to your potential customers.

As I end this post I’d like to ask you some questions. What’s your story? What makes your story so enticing that it can get people interested on paying attention to you. Or do you even have a story to tell? If you don’t have, maybe its time to evaluate yourself. Maybe put yourself in the position of your readers (if you have) and ask yourself, “what’s the reason Im following this guy?”.

This post is written by Melvin Dichoso who blogs at MelvinBlog Dot Com where he shares all his thoughts in the industry. He is also giving a free eBook called Blog Marketing for Fame which is all about marketing your blogs competitively.

At 16, I built my first ever blog. That was almost 5 years ago, and I’m still blogging to this day. Despite having recently sold the 10th biggest personal development blog in the world and gaining 2,000+ subscribers on my marketing blog in the last 4 months, I used to be a total blogging failure.

ViperChill, the site I recently relaunched, is the first blog I ran. In my naivety, I didn’t write at all for human visitors at all; I didn’t care. I simply wrote for search engines, and aimed to get as much traffic from them as I could.

Obviously this wasn’t a very good strategy, ending my first year of writing with 0 blog comments and 6 subscribers, which were probably all me on different Google reader accounts. But hey, I was getting some search engine traffic.

Thankfully, I have managed to turn that 1st year of blogging-hell into experience, and now run some very popular websites. I recently sold my biggest blog, PluginID, for a mid-five-figure fee, so I want to share the story of how I went from being a nobody in a niche to dominating a market.

The Story of PluginID

PluginID was my blog built for the personal development niche. When I started it, I was an absolutely nobody in the industry. And, if I’m totally honest, I didn’t read any blogs in the industry either. I was going through a lot of personal growth in my life after having recently moved to South Africa at 18 (where I didn’t know one single person) and decided to document my experiences.

Having been in the internet marketing space for 3 years prior to starting the site and having companies like Land Rover and Hewlett Packard receiving my services, I was confident I could make the site a success. Yet, dreams and hopes aren’t anything without taking action to make things happen.

As I had a full-time job when running the site, I would usually work on my blog from 7pm onwards, and sometimes wouldn’t stop until 2am in the morning. I really loved writing about topics like motivation, productivity and being who you want to be, so the long hours didn’t bother me.

I worked hard on the site and finally reached what I view as a respectable milestone – 500 feed subscribers – after 7 months. I say finally as with my background, I expected a little more. Little did I realise that blogging really does have a ‘hurdle’ to cross when you first start, and 5 months later the site was at 4,000 subscribers.

After 18 months of running the site I sold it to someone I know for a fair, five-figure fee. The site was making around $3,000 per month on average through selling ads and products, so it was a nice deal for both involved. I honestly never thought I would sell the site as I loved the topic so much, but I had been longing to get back into the topic of internet marketing where I had spent so much of my earlier years online.

I’m all for doing what you love, so I decided to relaunch my “baby.”

The Success of ViperChill

In October 2009, I posted a “I’m back” message on the site. I hadn’t posted on the domain for over two years, but was fortunate to start with around 2,000 subscribers, although I doubted many of them were still active. After writing that first post, I just felt really excited to start getting into the swing of things again. In fact, this was exactly how I felt when I started PluginID.

As you’re reading Tyler’s blog, you probably know of quite a few other sites in the internet marketing space. I sure did, and besides Tyler’s blog there was clear factor about most of them: they write short, dispensable, throwaway posts. For every 20 articles on most of these sites, there might be one gem that you can learn from.

Through my experience with PluginID, I knew I didn’t want to be like that. I wanted every single post I wrote to be valuable and one of the best resources on that topic you can find. In other words, I decided not to churn out 7, 500-word posts per week like a lot of these sites. Instead, I post once or twice per week and write articles that are usually over 2,000 words in length.

The result? In the last 4 months the blog has grown by over 2,000 subscribers and I’ve been mentioned frequently on some of the most popular blogs in the industry.

What this has to do with you…

I’m not sharing my story to show off or so that you think of me as some sort of guru. There are lots of other people who would prefer that kind of Ego boost or guru status. Instead, I’m sharing my story because the secret to making each of these blogs successful is simply that there are no secrets.

Sorry if that annoys you and you were looking for something to overcome your “competitors” (there are no competitors to valuable bloggers), but it’s the truth. Sure there are tweaks and tricks you can apply to get the most out of your site, and your audience, but for the most part, there’s just a few fundamentals that matter.

Here’s What I Want You To Do

I don’t have any ads or affiliate links on my site, so there’s nothing I want to sell you or convince you to do. However, I write in this space because I genuinely want to help people share their true value with the world (often in the form of blogging) and live the life that they want to live (making a living online).

Therefore, I have a few suggestions for you.

1. Stop Making Excuses

Picasso wasn’t born with a paintbrush in his hand and J.K. Rowling wasn’t possessed with some special talent that has made her over $1bn through writing. When you’re born, everyone starts on the same playing field. I understand that some people have a wealthy family or aren’t born into the best environment, but if you’re able to read this article, then you’re better off than most.

I look back on how I spent a few years online and honestly cringe. The countless hours I spent browsing Digitalpoint and buying the latest ‘make money overnight’ product could have been spent doing things that really helped me.

I am not lucky, I simply provided enough value to my audience on a regular basis and received the success I did because of that. If you do the same, your position will be the same. Get rid of your excuses right now, because they aren’t helping you progress, they’re just holding you back.

2. Stop Caring About What You Get Back

It wasn’t until I stopped focusing on monetary or subscriber rewards and started focusing on providing value to people that my websites actually became successful. It makes sense right? If you genuinely focus on helping people then things will come back your way.

Look at the top sites in this industry like Problogger, Copyblogger and Chris Brogan. They have been consistently providing value for years and now they’re being rewarded for their efforts.

The top blogs are the ones that have a core focus on helping their readers. Do you think Seth Godin needs to sell more books? Do you think he needs to blog everyday to continue to make a living? Of course not, he’s a multi-millionaire, but he just genuinely loves helping people.

Unless you run a news or some form of entertainment site, then everything you do should be around your readers and providing massive value. Again, it’s not surprise that those who give the most get the most back in return.

3. Finally, Stop Looking for the Secrets

As I mentioned earlier, there are great tips and tricks to pick up for your blog around the web. One I particularly liked was by Tim Ferriss where he found that changing his ‘Categories’ section to ‘Topics’ massively increased their click-through rate.

I love reading things like this, but they’re only going to take you so far. Having a blog with awful content that is plastered with ads isn’t going to take you very far, even if you do use the Thesis theme for Wordpress and rename that category label.

Look around at the top 100 Technorati blogs and the biggest sites in your industry. Notice how they are consistently providing massive value to their readers. They may do it in different formats (text, images, video) and they may have different posting schedules, but they’re still doing it.

The real switch happened for me when I stopped looking for the tricks and secrets to make me money, and just started building sites around the things that I loved with the aim to really help people with that topic. It’s not the same as most of the advice you read online, but most of the advice about making money is from people who only make money by teaching you.

Now, can you please promise me you’re going to share your value with the world? Because I can promise you, the world is waiting for it.

Glen Allsopp writes at ViperChill on the topic of Viral Marketing. He recently posted a guide to Wordpress SEO that you may learn a lot from.

A little over two weeks ago, we decided to finally move to our own host and domain. We spent about 8 months on BlogSpot but eventually decided it was time to move on from the free hosting days. As we expanded our website capabilities using Wordpress, we also decided to expand our revenue earning beyond the horizon of Google AdSense. While AdSense was great for beginners who do not really have any experience with affiliate marketing and content based ads, eventually you will need to incorporate other methods to start earning revenue.

We decided to experiment with Commission Junction Affiliate Marketing, located at www.cj.com. Commission Junction is basically a hub where you can search for companies by name, type, theme, genre, category, etc… that you are interested in promoting on your site. Once you find companies that you are interested in working with, you have to apply and be approved by the company itself before you can continue the process. Some applications take a few days for a response, and others take only seconds. Some of the higher end companies require you to have had your website running for at least several months and also frequently require you to have at least a certain amount of unique visitors per day. Each company varies.

Once you are approved for an affiliate program, you will receive an email from the company itself introducing themselves and discussing how their program works. Many of the companies offer commissions in the range of 2%-15%. Once you decide that you want to work with the company (after being approved), you then click on their link, where you are then taken to a banner generator. Often, you can decide what size banner you want, what color, whether or not it’s in flash or html, etc. Each company provides their own advertisements and sizes. Once the code has been generated, you can place it directly onto your homepage/main page, directly into an article, or wherever else you may desire. (Check out the affiliate section of our homepage)

After the banner has been added to your site, you can track clicks, leads, sales, and more right through Commission Junction’s control center, much like you can in either Google AdSense or Amazon’s Affiliate Marketing Program. Right off the bat, in our first month of using Commission Junction, we have had more clicks than we ever had using Google AdSense. At this rate, Commission Junction could become our main advertising utility.

Be advised though – its not that simple. Most of the advertisers only pay commissions and not for leads or clicks. So in order to really make any money, you have to have lots of clicks in the hopes that some of these clicks will result in a product purchase. A good idea is to incorporate these ads into your articles that deal with similar content. For example, I included a Bplay ad in an article about a Blackberry App (check it out). This is a great way to utilize Commission Junction’s affiliates to the maximum.

Commission Junction also offers great performance reporting based on individual ads and days. We have been using this to optimize our ad placement and ad selection. For example, we have several ads that have been getting a very high percentage of clicks per impressions (over 50%). We have been swapping ads in and out of the website according to these statistics. These can track not only individual advertisers but their individual ads that you place in your website.

Unfortunately, you cannot view the exit page of the ad. That would be a really helpful tool, especially when learning of the ad placement. In less than one month, we have already had 84 clicks out of 14,792 impressions, far surpassing our performance in Google AdSense. However, keep in mind, most advertisers only pay for commissions and not clicks.

Overall, Commission Junction is a great affiliate program with huge potential when its used effectively. The variety of advertisers surpasses many other advertising venues and the potential commissions are at very competitive rates. Give Commission Junction a try and let us know what you think.

It’s a tough time for businesses around the US – but it is also an exciting time. Amid the job losses, the scandal and the panic, there’s opportunity for the fleet of mind. And the statistics and anecdotes bear this out – more and more people are taking the plunge and setting up their own online businesses.

Indeed, one of the key benefits of setting up an internet business is the reduced overheads – no premises means less spending which, in turn, means you can offer more competitive prices to your customers. In fact, you can make a point of undercutting your more-established competitors to help gain a foothold on the market ladder.

Surveying the wide range of opportunities thrown up by improved technology, globalization and the fallout from the shifting of the world economy’s tectonic plates, it can be hard to know where to focus your energies. Given all the uncertainty, it’s worth taking the time to have a good, hard think about what your emerging markets are, and how you’re going to make the most of them. After all, if your core markets are changing, it would be good to have the security of other sources of business.

Emerging markets are traditionally considered to be geographical – people talk of the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China. Of course, the vast majority of small businesses can’t have such a global reach, so why talk about emerging markets? Two reasons: firstly, it’s a useful way of analysing your own business; and secondly, international markets may not be as unattainable to new businesses as you’d think.

Analyzing your business

You’ll be acutely aware of the changes happening in your market. By changes, I mean, the types of customer growing in importance, the types of service/product becoming more popular among your client base, where your clients are physically located, how they tend to hear about you, the reason they choose you…the list is endless. You’ll be able to ride the ups and downs if you’re aware of these trends, and make strategic decisions on the basis of both your own observations and feedback from customers and colleagues. You need to be able to divide each of these different strands of your business up, so you can:

• back the winners (those which are contributing significant operating profit as a % of the overall operating profit)
• discover and back emergent new winners (those whose share of the operating profit is growing quickly and likely to make them a ‘winner’ in future)
• dump the losers (those which generate little or no operating profit, cost a lot in terms of money or management time.)

At Lingo24, for example, we’ve been doing a lot of work to expand our reach in foreign language markets. We wanted to spread our sales risk beyond the UK (thank goodness given the decline in the value of the pound!) and reduce our exposure to changes in currency exchange rates.

Two years ago, we set up websites in the languages of the affluent countries of northern and western Europe – Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. There’s a lot less competition in these countries, so we thought we’d try our luck. It’s been a success – we’ve managed to win significant business.

In April, for example, only 36% of our business came from the UK, and five countries contributed at least 5% of our turnover. To me, these figures reflect a business which has a strong, diversified client base – and businesses with such a profile are likely to withstand shocks from changing circumstances within individual companies or countries.

Considering international markets

An emerging market could be a particular type of service/product to existing customers – a newly developed offering, for example, or one which, for whatever reason, was not available to your client base before. It could be a new channel through which people find you – perhaps a publication which starts covering your business.

But based on our own experience at Lingo24, I’d recommend you try to develop your own new emerging market(s) abroad. There are quite a few reasons why even new or small businesses might look to export as a way of developing a new sales channel for their businesses:

• the foreign language internet is far less competitive than the English language internet
• US companies have a positive reputation in foreign markets
• the cost of testing the market using search engines is low

It sounds good, but where to start?

The key thing is to develop your understanding of the market. If you have customers abroad, or US clients with links abroad, ask them whether they think your offering might be attractive internationally. If they do, ask them for contacts that could help you validate your ideas better and perhaps be your first international customers.

If you understand foreign languages, use your skills as if you were a customer to find out who you’d be up against in the foreign language market. If you don’t, you can use Google’s automatic translation tools to get the gist of what your competition are up to. If your instinct tells you there’s opportunity, you can use Google and Yahoo’s tools to identify the key phrases you will need to target in your foreign markets. Armed with all this information, all you’ll need is a good professional translation service to adapt your web copy, and you’re off! Bonne chance!

About the author
Christian Arno is founder of Lingo24, a global translation and localization company. With operations spanning four continents and clients in over sixty countries, they translated over thirty million words in the past twelve months. Their turnover in 2009 was in excess of $6m USD.

The key is in conversion.

When a visitor first arrives at your site, you must be mindful of what you want them to do. Whether it’s signing up for your opt-in newsletter, or purchasing your product right from the get go, the full fruit of your endeavor will never be felt until the site is successful in every cylinder. Visitors don’t make a niche website successful, conversions do.

There are plenty of tools to help you climb to the top of Google. Attracting traffic is only part of the target. Conversion is where you’ll find your site’s true magic beans. The only thing that’s going to render it to reality however, is having the best landing page possible.

A landing page is the first thing you want your visitors see when arriving at your site. It must not only instantly convince your visitors to stay, it must drive them directly to action. If your landing page isn’t great, you are simply not going to convert. If it isn’t good, your visitors will barely be around long enough to register the visit.

The next time your sitting down to write a landing page, keep these four tips in mind to ensure it’s the best it can possibly be.

1) Install an exit pop-up into your page. When visitors are about to leave, they’ll see a pop up inviting them to stick around and receive an extra special discount. This tactic is best used when coupled with scarcity. Let the visitor know about your limited time offer. CAUTION: Scarcity works, but you should NEVER say anything that isn’t true. Credibility is exponentially more important than a sale.

2) Consider your opt-in IS your conversion, at least for now. Sure, you could make the sale straightaway, but perhaps that’s a bit short sighted. Perhaps it’s better to gather a name and address, steadily building a list of prospects for future conversion. A one time sale is nice, but by getting that visitor on your list, you might be making a long time customer.

3) Use an opt-in pop over. Feel comfortable with the knowledge ahead of time that though not everyone likes to buy, nearly everyone likes to get stuff so long as it’s free. Use an opt in pop over to provide your visitor with the option of receiving a free ebook in exchange for their email address. The sale is still your priority of course, but a visitor who leaves behind their email address is a lot better than a visitor who simply leaves.

4) The no pressure opt-in. Consider a landing page with absolutely nothing to sell. I know, I know, it’s the stuff of fairy tales and it probably leaves you wondering what the point could possibly be. It’s simple. If you have a well written landing page with nothing to sell, you should have little difficulty gathering opt-ins for whatever it is you’re offering. You might not be able to garner tens of thousands of sales, but a landing page built to gather leads might be a better paved road to riches after all.

The job of your landing page is to convert. What you are asking your visitor to convert to is entirely up to you. Just make sure you spend the time needed to make your landing page as bulletproof as possible.

Sean Platt and Danny Cooper help small businesses to build their websites and establish an effective online presence. Click the link to get the free report, “Why Your Business Needs a Website.”

To coin an old saying; everybody has to start somewhere. This is also true of affiliate marketing, there would have been a day where some of the super affiliates you read about now earned nothing or even made a loss. Retrospectively you could say they came from nothing to the riches they enjoy today, but the whole idea of coming “Zero to Hero” in something like affiliate marketing often gives off the wrong ideas to people new to the field.

A lot of startup affiliate marketers that I know personally or that get in touch with me through my blog take this phrase too literally. I’m in the same boat as a lot of affiliate marketers, I don’t have a job (I’m a full time student) and there are no jobs in the current economic client, I’m pretty broke and I’m looking for a way to turn my spare time I usually spend playing games to make some extra cash – hopefully it’ll turn in to a full time job eventually. But one thing I’m come to realize and the new affiliate marketers should too is that risk plays a big part in affiliate marketing. If you’re in this for the big bucks, you’re really going to have to spend money to make money – if you don’t dare, you’re in the wrong place.

Let’s put it into perspective. For example one of my friends, we’ll call her Carol, spends $250 a month on clothes. Now when it comes to affiliate marketing, she spends maybe $10 on a domain, $10 on some hosting and then she hopes to make money instantly. Why didn’t Carol just spend $100 less on clothes that month and use it on affiliate marketing? Chances are she would of learnt a helluva lot and maybe made a small return. In order to learn, you need to test, in order to test, you need to spend. If losing $25 to a bad campaign is putting you down in the dumps and making you think about quitting – your mentality is all wrong.

I’m not new to the game, but I’m not a pro either. I’ve earnt $100’s, but I’ve lost $100’s. If I spent $500 and made $450, I don’t see that as a loss right now, because I’ve spent $50 on learning so much that it was worth it. Too many newbies are losing $10 on a campaign and deleting it. Spend a bit more, if it doesn’t convert; pause it and investigate why, ask for help from any affiliate marketing friends you may have or ask on a forum for advice.

Now this post isn’t here to discourage you low budget startups, it’s here to give you a warning that you need the right mindset to make big money in this game. This isn’t to say that starting from nothing is impossible. You can setup a free website, put some amazon affiliate links on it and wait for the SEO traffic to trickle in slowly, you might make $xx a month to start with, if you really go for the SEO tactic you could make $xxx or even $xxxx. But starting from nothing is a slow process and I’d recommend you get used to testing and losing a bit of money – if you can’t afford to lose $100 each week, try a new campaign each month.

Whatever your situation, you can start affiliate marketing and earn a profit, it’s just whether or not you go about it properly. Don’t get overwhelmed by the losses you’ll make, just keep thinking of the day you crack how to run a successful campaign.

Recently I was asked how to scale a campaign on Google’s Content Network.  For many, this can be a very challenging, daunting task.  For me, this is one of my favorite pay-per-click platforms to promote affiliate offers.  Let me explain.

Google’s Content Network is an extension of their Adwords advertising.    Using the Content Network you can target your advertisements via site placements (URLs) or by keywords.  You then have the option to either bid CPC (cost-per-click) or CPM (cost per one-thousand impressions).  The Content Network is very different than placing advertisements on their Search platform.  In this post, I’m going to explain how use Google’s Content Network to promote your affiliate offers and how to dominate your competition.  In the coming weeks, I’m also going to hold a real-life case study using this manual on my blog.

Before we jump right into things, there are a few things you’re going to need.  First and most important is a budget.  You’re going to need some money that you’re willing to invest to test out your campaigns.  Recently, I wrote a guide on “PPC Marketing 101.”  In that guide, I explained how investing in your campaigns a lot like getting an education is.  You have to spend some money to learn, before you can make money.  So for that matter, I suggest starting with $5,000 a month dedicated just to Google’s Content Network.  This should be plenty of money for you to learn the ins and outs of the platform and more-than-likely begin profiting.  Please don’t get yourself into credit card debt or spend money you don’t have.  Don’t try to take on this task until you have the money to invest!

Once you have your money set aside, you’re ready to begin.   You’ll also need to have an account at your favorite affiliate network or program that you want to promote (I recommend Copeac).  The key to being successful on the Content Network is finding traffic that is cheap, yet effective.  For many this is also the most challenging task, but it is possible.  Also, a lot of people try to setup their Content Network campaign the same way they do their search campaign.  This is the WORST mistake.  Even though they are both on Adwords, the internal structure to each campaign is very different.   Personally I recommend having one Adwords account dedicated to search and another one dedicated to content.

When your account is ready, you can begin creating your campaigns.  When you’re targeting someone on search they are actively searching for your product or service.  With this, you’re able to laser target the traffic to your offer.  The content network on the other hand is different.  Those ads are placed on websites all around the Internet.  Therefore, your objective is to interrupt the reader and have them click your advertisement to eventually convert. “I Lost 59 LBS” – This is an example of a headline that you could use.  You want to make the visitor notice your advertisement and follow through to complete your offer.

Getting traffic on the content network can also be challenging.  Given that you’re not targeting someone who is actively searching for a product; your traffic quality is going to be lower.  That is why I like to go after the cheap traffic.  To find cheap traffic on Google’s Content Network, you need to use keywords that are of popular news items.  An example of this would be “swine flu” or “h1n1”.  Websites all across the Internet report daily on new outbreaks, prevention tips, vaccines, etc.  Therefore it is very beneficial to use this story to your advantage to getting cheap traffic.

When setting up your Content Network campaign it is important to note that your ad groups are used to describe what you’re targeting.  Google only looks at the first 50 keywords in each ad group to determine where to place your advertisement.  Therefore one of your ad groups could look like this:

Ad Group Name: Swine Flu Group 1

Keywords:

• about swine flu
• and swine flu
• asian swine flu
• avoid swine flu
• bird swine flu
• ca swine flu
• cdc swine flu
• current swine flu
• death from swine flu
• first swine flu
• get swine flu
• getting swine flu
• great swine flu
• h1n1 swine flu
• how to prevent swine flu
• human swine flu
• information on swine flu
• is swine flu
• japan swine flu
• latest on swine flu
• mexican swine flu
• national swine flu
• new swine flu
• pandemic swine flu
• prevent swine flu
• preventing swine flu
• recent swine flu
• shot swine flu
• stop swine flu
• swine flu
• swine flu 1918
• swine flu 1919
• swine flu 1976
• swine flu advice
• swine flu affair
• swine flu alert
• swine flu americans
• swine flu areas
• swine flu article
• swine flu asia
• swine flu australia
• swine flu avian
• swine flu birds
• swine flu blog
• swine flu canada
• swine flu cases
• swine flu chart
• swine flu clinic
• swine flu clinics
• swine flu cure

There is no need to copy this word-for-word as I just used Google’s Free Keyword Generator to make this list.  You would then want to create an ad copy to go along with this ad group.  An example may look like this:

“The Swine Flu Kills”

Prevent the Swine Flu with the all new XYZ Multi-Vitamin.

Notice how the headline is designed to get the attention of the reader while the ad description goes on to explain more what you’re trying to promote.  You could then direct traffic to a website that promotes multi-vitamins.

Please note: The above is just an example; I’ve never created a campaign based around the Swine Flu.

By using “popular news stories” to generate your Content Network campaigns, you’re able to find a lot of cheap traffic with large amounts of volume. If you’re creative you can make a lot of money while the topic is hot.  The possibilities are endless with this method as long as you’re willing to take a risk and think outside the box.

Last of all I always want to remind people of one thing.  There is NO substitute for hard work.  This blog post, a PPC coaching site, etc. is NO magic pill or formula.  Successful Affiliates are successful because they’re willing to be dedicated and work harder than everyone else.  You have to be willing to make sacrifices and put the effort into this, if you’re ever going to be a Super Affiliate!  Good luck!

To learn more about how to make money online, check out Ryan’s blog at SuperAffiliateTwins.com.