Make Your Own Affiliate Banners

I do a lot of affiliate promotion and one of my biggest pet peeves is joining an affiliate program with poor affiliate graphics or none at all. I mean if you want me to promote your product give me something to work with folks!

To get around a lack of quality promotion materials or the fact that I am using an indirect affiliate service like Amazon I have started to use my own affiliate banners.  They look good and they are unique to me so my visitors know I REALLY DO like these products. Here are some examples I just started using last month.

goddess-dehydrate

vita-mix-banner

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New Affiliate Marketing Mentorship

making money online

When I first started an online business five years ago I imagined that I would profit by selling my own products and by selling advertising on my web sites. I knew that I did not want to offer services like coaching, admin help, or design. I was a VA for while until I decided that it was time to put all the light night hours and effort into my own business, not someone else’s.

I quickly found that selling my own physical products was too demanding of my time. Selling my own info products was hard too because I needed to come up with good ideas and at the time I was short on ideas. What I didn’t “get” was that I didn’t have to come up with the ideas but eventually I did catch on. I decided to try my hand at this affiliate marketing “stuff” I was hearing about. I joined a couple programs and added a few links to my sites. For months I earned nothing and I was just about ready to call it quits on that experiment when I decided to send an email to my small list and include an affiliate link. Immediately I got a few sales. They were really small sales that only brought in about $3 each but it was progress. The best part was that this money was completely passive and this was the biggest perk for me because even securing advertisers was too hands on for me.

I joined other relevant programs, added more links to my sites and slowly but surely I was seeing some money every month. I knew that the niche I had chosen for my web site was severely limiting the type of affiliate programs I could work with though, so I decided to start another web site. This one ended up being my cash cow and right from the start my MAIN objective was to bring in affiliate income.

There was just no need to create my own products when I could sell other people’s products and let them do all the hard work. Of course now I DO have my own products but I am still an affiliate marketer first and foremost.

This week one of the BEST and brightest affiliate marketers on the net has opened a new affiliate marketing membership site called Affiliatenaire. Jimmy knows affiliate marketing and has a reputation for selling thousands of products and memberships in days. Everyone knows that when he sells something it is the gold standard…the real deal. Perhaps they are like me and are also enthralled with his mesmerizing Matthew McConaughey voice, hehe.

I have no doubt that Affiliatenaire will sell out quickly (just like Membernaire did) as he is only offering 1000 spots. The program is an an intensive monthly course on affiliate marketing. You get one lesson each week and if you act on everything he gives, you can start building an affiliate marketing empire in only 2-3 hours a week.

This course would be great for beginners but even better for people who are using affiliate marketing techniques already and want to use some of the tactics the pros do. I plan on doing the full course myself as I have never joined one of Jimmy’s programs or bought one of his reports and NOT learned some amazing new things. The first lesson is over 20 pages long and is really good stuff.

With the economy the way it is I know I am trying to secure as many sources of income as possible. I need to get creative and diversify even more to protect what I have worked so hard to build. Here is to another great year in online business!

Check out Affiliatenaire for yourself…

Info Product Killer Review

I bought Info Product Killer a few months ago and wanted to give it a nice test run before I reviewed it. The sales page is hyping it up for Christmas and it is obviously too late to use it for that but I think it is really an ANY time guide for developing quick and easy, niche affiliate sites.

The creator of this system shows proof on the sales page that he made over $100,000 during the holiday season using the process he describes in detail in Info Product Killer. He claims it only took about 3 weeks to get everything set up and I believe him after making 2 of these sites myself. I regret not making more!

The system consists of dozens of pdf guides and step by step videos on how to create small, super easy niche sites that revolve around physical products. In his videos he shows toy sites quite a bit. He networks them together so they can give each other link juice and he creates some quick but quality content and he waits for the money to roll in. The videos follow him on his computer screen as he sets them up. There is also a lot of info on choosing hot products, how to set up keywords, getting links and traffic, how to do headers, how to use AdWords if you choose to, and where to get content.

So to test it out I decided to start small and create one brand new site and one new section on and existing web site. Both revolved around toys. I started small so that I could see if it worked without too much of a time investment. I guess I was pessimistic. ;)

The first thing I did was add a niche green toys guide to my existing site. I did get creative and use some of my own touches but I think I followed the ideas pretty well. I even used one of the free web site templates that are included with the product. I just edited it to look more like my existing site and then I added the content and products. Unlike many of the sites shown in the product I pretty much stuck with only 2-3 affiliate programs instead of the MANY that are shown in the videos. After finishing the gift guide I linked to it from some of my other sites and Squidoo pages and added a nice banner to the sidebar of all the other pages and I was curious to see how it would go because this section of my site gets only a fraction of the traffic that my blog does. It took about 3 hours to do and I think I got it done by late October. The net income from this set of 4-5 pages thus far is $372.45 from Amazon and Shareasale.

 toy guide screenshot

 

The next project I completed was even faster…only about 2 hours. I purchased a new domain and I chose to promote Wall-E toys. I used content I had already written…just gave it a refresher, then I linked to it from several of my own sites, made a Wall-E Squidoo page, and added a free reprint article to ezine articles. I made a banner in about 5 minutes and just copied and pasted all the Wall-E products I could find via Amazon. I REALLY doubted I would make anything but hey, I was willing to try. From this site I made $51.22 from Amazon. I paid $7.50 for the domain.

walle screenshot

So did I get rich? No….but I am still pleased. I made roughly $83 an hour for the 5 hours I worked on these sites. And honestly, compared to all the author does to his sites…I did a really half-assed job. I am lazy about details sometimes.

So…I wish I had made a couple dozen more because I think the trick is too have lots of these small niches sites. On their own they may not be making you rich but add them together and you have got some profit. And let’s not forget that these two sites will still be around after Christmas too…so I could be making some residual profits all year long.

Next year around mid August I will FOR SURE be making lots of niche Christmas sites.

I highly recommend Info Product Killer! Oh and I found this discount on code on the net: WSO777. It appears to still be valid and sells the product for only $79!