Kamikaze Affiliate Marketing

This is how it is: I am trying to make money on the Internet. In order to earn money online, I created this blog which is about earning money online, blogging, affiliate marketing and anything else I think would be of interest to other people like me trying to earn a bit of money online.

One of the best ways to earn money online is Clickbank, only I am not selling anything with this damn program! Why not? Well, I am just realizing that I am trying to sell stuff from my Clickbank account to people who probably already have a Clickbank account, and if they don't already have one, I am doing everything I can to encourage them to open their own, so if they are going to buy anything from Clickbank, they are going to get it from their own account and pocket the commission themselves!

Last January I wrote 2 articles that had nothing to do with making money online which included my Clickbank hoplink and published them on Associated Content: out of about 200 readers, 4 bought the diet e-book that I was reviewing. Unfortunately, what I did was against Associated Content's policy and my articles were quickly removed from their website.

I kept on blogging about how to make money online without actually making any (if I don't count the $1.50-$1.70 that Associated Content pays me each month for my articles, but I don't call that money, this feels much more like peanuts being thrown to a monkey!). All this time, I was trying to sell stuff to the WRONG people!

I haven't been using this blog much for promoting Clickbank products, in fact if I ignore the ads displayed on the blog, I have only ever tried to sell something once, everything else I promoted was free, and I know trying to sell you something here would be totally useless because if you are like me, you don't want to spend money on money-making software or e-books, you want it all for free and I don't blame you for this!

So even though I will keep promoting freebies whenever I come across good ones, anything else I want to earn money from "Clickbankwise" will have to be done elsewhere (hey, this blog is not the only place I can use to promote stuff) and on a different sort of products; I am actually thinking of digging up that diet article and publishing it on Go Articles, since they allow links in their articles; I don't know how I didn't think of doing this sooner!

I hope this post doesn't sound too much like a boring ramble; what I wanted to say in short is that selling affiliate marketing products to affiliate marketers is just plain suicide. I don't think this works very well and unless you are a publisher with an e-book or software that you have created yourself, if you want to make money with Clickbank, you should stick to selling their e-books to people who don't know that Clickbank even exists.

My New Money-Making Projects

I haven't been very active on this blog this week but this doesn't mean I haven't been working hard and coming up with new smart ways to earn money online!

I signed up with Numenmail 4 days ago: this is not really my usual style but yes, I have been taken in by their seemingly very attractive program! Numenmail is one of those Paid to Read Emails websites but this one looks like it really pays well. Payout level is at $8888: yes, I know this is huge but I got a free $800 bonus on sign up and most of their emails pay $80 plus I get on average 20 links to click per day (so far) which pay $5 each. So far I have a balance of $1670 and I am still expecting something to pop out of their site telling me that for some reason they cannot pay me when I get to $8888!

I don't want to turn this blog into one of these sites listing all sorts of Get Paid to websites and full of banners trying to get referrals, with (in my opinion) very little good content. I am not saying these are bad, I just think there are enough already out there and I don't want to join the masses. If you are interested in finding out whether Numenmail is a scam or the real thing, you can follow my progress on Can I Really Make Money Reading Emails?, which I update every day with my new earnings and anything else related to this that I might find of interest. I will also write a post here when I reach payout level (I should be rich by then!), and if (as I suspect) I find out this is a scam, I will make sure to update you on that too!

I also created a new Squidoo lens, How to Increase your Clickbank Commissions, containing affiliate marketing tips so that I can promote my affiliate marketing articles and links and (especially) my Clickbank portal.

Talking about affiliate marketing, I wrote 3 articles about affiliate marketing during the week. I will publish them all on Associated Content and also on my favourite article directories (this is so I can try and get more links to this blog and and promote my Clickbank portal), but not all at the same time. I think I should wait at least for a week between each batch of submission so that I do not get slapped by Google for submitting duplicate content to different websites.

I Just Got Myself a Brand New Money-Making Website!

Internet Junkie is all about the smart ways to earn money online, so imagine being able to promote 10000 clickbank products all at the same time, all from a website you can get for free (yes, even the hosting is free!); do you think this is too good to be true?

I must say I had difficulty believing that I could really own a website containing thousands of products allowing me to earn lots of clickbank dollars, but I found it and it really looks the business; everything is there, even the free Internet Marketing Ebooks!

Owning a free website is very well and good, but now that I have this great asset, what do I do with it?

I don't expect to sit here doing nothing and having thousands of dollars mailed to me each month: there are a few steps I can think of now if I want to earn a few dollars a month (I would be happy with just that to start with!), and the first is to edit this blog's layout so that my portal can not be missed by any visitor (I will have to get rid of my own clickbank ads that didn't bring me any sales by the way!), I will have to include my brand new link in some of my forum's signatures and my Facebook profile, write an article or 3 praising the benefits of a free clickbank portal, and of course, create a new Squidoo lens about it too.

I think I have a busy week ahead of me and I really want to make this work so if you don't mind I'll get to work right now!

Oh, and before I forget, If you are interested in getting your own free money-making website, you can sign up for free through my own clickbank portal!

Do You Think Clickbank Is a Scam?

After visiting a few online discussion forums, I came across a few posts claiming that Clickbank may be a scam. It is true that it can be a bit tricky to get your first cheque from them, but if you go through Clickbank's accounting policy, you should know what to expect from this affiliate programme.

If you are a new affiliate, when you reach your payment threshold, which can be set anywhere between $10 and $10000, you will not automatically receive a cheque, as there are conditions that must be fulfilled first.

You must have payments coming from at least 5 different credit cards in order to be paid by Clickbank, with at least one being a Visa and one a Mastercard, and this minimum excludes payments made with Paypal balances and eChecks.

If your Clickbank account is in credit but you are not eligible yet to receive your first cheque, after 90 days of inactivity, Clickbank will deduct $1 per pay period (2 weeks) from your balance. After 180 days, this goes up to $5 per pay period and $15 after one year of inactivity.

Unfortunately, even though Clickbank usually accepts payments made via Paypal, they do not use this facility to pay their affiliates or publishers; you will have to wait for a cheque to be mailed to you and for every cheque that is made out to you, $2.50 will be deducted from your account.

Being a Clickbank affiliate means that you will get typically between 50% and 75% of a product's net sale amount (calculated as follows: retail price - (7.5% of retail price + $1)). This is one of the biggest commission rates that can be found online so if you expect to earn almost 75% of each product you promote without any drawbacks, you are out of luck!

Even though it can be a bit of a hassle getting your first check from Clickbank, I don't think it is a scam; if it was, not only the accounting policy would not be so easy to access, but you would probably also be asked to pay a subscription fee before being able to promote their marketplace's products.

As with every other money-making opportunity you wish to participate in, you must read the information that is available on Clickbank's website if you want to make the most of your experience with them. Clickbank's accounting policy may not please everyone so if you don't like it, you don't have to join them!

My Evil Money-Making Plan: the Outcome

Last December, I wrote This Is How I Will Make Money In 2008, mentioning that I was going to write some clickbank product reviews containing my affiliate link on Associated Content.

For those of you not too familiar with Clickbank, or if you are just curious to read it, you can read Write Clickbank Product Reviews that Will Sell, my latest Associated Content article.

As I already mentioned, the inclusion of affiliate links in articles is against Associated Content's rules, and, as expected, they caught up with me: last Saturday, one of the administrators sent me an email to inform me that they had removed the articles containing my clickbank hoplinks from their website.

I did not write this post to whine about Associated Content, as I admit I knowingly wrote the articles in question. I should count myself lucky that I have not been banned from submitting articles on their website and I will write articles that comply to their rules from now on.

I just thought I would mention that for the time my first article was on the Associated Content website (about 4 weeks), it received 248 page views and 4 of these converted into sales, allowing me to earn $58.48 in commission from Clickbank.

There are some article submission websites that allow affiliate links in the body of your articles, but submitting those will reduce the chances of having your articles downloaded by webmasters and republished on someone else's blog or website. Nobody wants an article that contains someone else's affiliate links on their website!

I think that the best option is to write your review of a clickbank product containing your affiliate link in your own website or blog, and then submit an article about the same product without the affiliate links. If you include your blog or website's address in your author box, your article will get more chances of being chosen by webmasters and viewed by their readers as well as by those who happen to read it on the article directory's website. As publishers are obliged to include your author box when uploading an article, the original review containing the affiliate links that you wrote on your own website will get exposed to more people, and as you already know, the more people that will read your review, the more chances you will have to earn some clickbank commission!

Thumbs up for Clickbank

Last night I checked my Clickbank account and my eyes almost popped out of my face when I saw that my earnings for the first two weeks of January amount to $58.48! I was very excited as this is the biggest amount ever earned by yours truly since starting this blog.

It looks like my evil money-making scheme is working after all. My pay-out level is set at $100 so I have a bit of work to do until I get a real cheque in my bank account (I am secretly hoping that the value of the dollar will increase again before I cash all my cheques).

So far I wrote 2 articles on Associated Content containing my clickbank hoplink but my earnings are only for one product. For 248 page views, 4 of products were sold; frankly, I don’t think this was my best ever written article but I guess the topic was a popular one since it is one of my most viewed articles.

My second article is not really a review, I am more or less making fun of 2 products so I don’t know it will sell very well but I just could not praise "The Woman Men Adore...and Never Want To Leave" and "How to Become an Alpha Male" and live with myself afterwards! You never know, advertising works in strange ways sometimes. Well, even if it doesn’t sell, I will have had great fun writing it so it was worthwhile doing!

When you start selling products with Clickbank, make sure you keep selling until you reach payout level because I know that an account in credit that stays inactive for 90 days will start incurring fees; some people call that a scam, I call it "read all the terms and conditions".

Updated on 25/01/08
My 2 articles on Associated Content containing Clickbank affiliate links have been removed today, so I advise you against using any affiliate links in your Associated Content articles.

Here Is Another Way To Make Money With Clickbank

In my last post, I talked about making money writing reviews about Clickbank products on Associated Content; I received a comment saying that Associated Content does not really like people submitting articles containing affiliate links and this is true, so in case anybody is trying the same, please don't overdo it: it could get you in trouble with Associated Content; but don't worry, there is another way:

You can set up a new blog or even use your current one, and write reviews on several Clickbank products. Of course, you need to write interesting posts also in this blog and choose products that are related to your blog's topic or else, any visitors will quickly get bored and leave; nobody would ever watch TV if it was only showing advertisements (not sane people anyway!).

There is also a website you can join if you are interested in making money writing reviews for Clickbank products: it is called ReviewsArena but I don't think it is a very good idea, unless you are the website owner, I explained the reason why in this article.

I will not do this myself because I find it difficult enough to keep this blog going and write articles and promote them, I also have a life (well, kind of!) and I don't want to suffer from burn-out.

This Is How I Will Make Money In 2008

At least I hope! Well, it is the time of the year where we are all full of good intentions, so here is one of them: make some actual real money online in 2008!

1- I will promote this blog more actively and earn a minimum $1000 from
Adsense. I will start using Social Bookmarking to promote my best blog posts and in order for this to work, I will need to Bookmark also other people's posts, because I don't want to be seen as a spammer. I am getting 250 free business cards and 100 free postcards printed at the time, courtesy of Vista Print with my blog details on them. I will put up some ads in shops advertising my blog (I think I have a good phrase in mind, which I don't want to reveal here, you might steal it from me!)

2- I also want to earn $1000 from Associated Content but that means, at $1.50 per 1000 pageviews, that I need to get 666 667 pageviews, which is 12820 pageviews per week; as I write on average 1 to 2 articles per week max which so far got at the most 200 pageviews (I started in October so these are not really realistic figures), I need to come up with the article of the century, or else write over 1000 articles and reviews, and I don't think I can come up with 20 articles a day! This is where no. 3 comes into action.

3- If I can't make $1000 from Associated Content, maybe Clickbank can help. I can write reviews on Associated Content. Better even, I can write some reviews about Clickbank products on Associated Content and promote them like mad! With my Clickbank hoplink here and there, if I do this once a week for a different product everytime, I should be getting some kind of commission from Clickbank!

2008 might not be the year when I will get rich, but I will make damn sure that I make enough money online to finance next Christmas, and if I don't make money from Adsense, Associated Content or Clickbank, there are still my PiggyPoints!


P.S. Before you go get drunk over the Christmas holidays, read 10 Healthy Hangover Cures! (I know, shameless promotion, but this is my blog, and I can do whatever I like with it!)


Updated on 25/01/08
I have just been informed by Associated Content that they have removed the 2 articles containing my clickbank affiliate links so I advise you against using the above advice. However, this still allowed me to earn €58.48!

DIY Blog Monetizing

Lately I have come up with ideas at the most unexpected times; take this morning for example, while I was mopping my bathroom floor (well my mind was not really on the job at hand!), I started thinking about my post on Clickbank; before writing the post I had been looking at the different monetizing programmes such as Adsense, Bidvertiser, etc.

I was toying with the idea of adding Bidvertiser on my blog but after reading a few comparison reviews between Adsense and Bidvertiser, I decided it would not make a lot of difference if I changed anything, especially as my blog does not attract huge volumes of traffic yet (athough I am hoping this will change in the next few months).

Here is the idea that came to me: what if I made my own ads containing my Clickbank hoplink and found a strategic place to display them? If someone ends up buying a product, I will get a much bigger commission than I would with Adsense or any other monetizing programme.

Of course the mere displaying of the ads will not get me a commission but I can choose my own ads, I can change them whenever I like and if I also keep Adsense, I think it can only be a win-win situation!

So here it is, I changed my blog's template to include a few Clickbank ads at the bottom of my posts, I also added a link to my own website because Clickbank doesn't need to own the monopole of my DIY Ads placing!

The only worry I have is that Google might see this as an attempt to display Adsense competing ads on my blog but even if it does, what is the risk? If I get banned from Adsense, I can either choose to display more of my own DIY ads instead or sign up with Bidvertiser, or a combination of both!

Can You Make Money With Clickbank?

I am not a huge fan of Clickbank products, and to tell you the truth, the Clickbank products websites really unnerve me: what is more annoying than clicking on a link, hoping to discover The secret that will allow me to make tons of money, and after reading a long sales pitch, find out I still know nothing of the product?

I am not going to lie to you: I did sign up to Clickbank hoping to make a few sales from my website but I never bought any Clickbank products. The thought of giving my money away to purchase an e-book that might or (more likely) might not help me to make money does not really appeal to me.

However, there is a system that could very well work for Clickbank affiliates; one day while I was looking for ways to make money, I downloaded my free "License to Print Money", which is an extract of the Millionnaire League. When I read it, I thought it looked like a great way to make money, and even though I have not tried it, I think it might just work.

I know this is a pretty poor sales pitch, but I heard that unusual can sell, and after all, I am a Clickbank affiliate and I am here to make money, so if you want to try the Millionnaire League, I suggest you download your free Licence To Print Money first by visiting the Millionnaire League's website. Once you get your free extract, if you decide to put it in practice, I would really appreciate your comments: tell me if it works, tell me if it's crap, tell me if it made you want to buy the system, tell me if you bought this or any other money-making Clickbank product, just talk to me, depending on the feedback I receive, I will use it for a post on this blog and if you are lucky, I might just decide to put a link to your blog or website in the post.

To download your free Licence To Print Money, Click Here!