Affiliate Marketing… In The Beginning

Before I jump right into my affiliate marketing blogging routine I though it would be good to write about the past.   You see I’ve been trying to make money at this gig for a few years now.   I’ve had a vision that affiliate marketing would be a great way to keep some income flowing when I retire (I’m 52 now).  So lets go back to the beginning and see how my quest has gone so far…

I started this journey about 5 years ago.   At that point in time I was buying and selling items on ebay trying to put a little extra cash in the bank.   While that did prove to be profitable it was a lot of work to buy, list, pack and ship items every day.

While I was doing the ebay thing I learned about affiliate marketing.  This approach to making money on the internet immediately peaked my interest.  I’m a I/T guy in my day job so I thought this would be great to build websites, build unix servers, learn PHP, etc.  Could the money be far behind?

So I set off and built a web server, put up some PHPNuke sites with affiliate datafeeds, posted some crappy content and volia I was an internet marketer.

The only problem was I didn’t know how to create traffic for my sites so I made hardly any money.   Strike one.

So I then ventured into the PPC / adwords game.   At the time on-line poker was a big deal and I love to play poker.   So I jumped in and created a bunch of adwords campaigns for poker sites and started making some money.   At my peak I was netting between $500 and $1000 a month.  I thought I had made it and it would be easy to grow from there.

Well it wasn’t,  I tried promoting some other products and services with adwords without success.  At the same time google decided to stop allowing poker adword campaigns.  Back to square one.  Strike 2

So I then joined the next coaching program, and then the next membership, and the next, and the next.   All of which didn’t work for me.   Why?  because I was looking for that no work, work model,  silly me.   Strike 3

Luckly this isn’t a baseball game and  after a couple of year of chasing the golden ring without success I reflected on my experience over that time.

I wondered if all the time, effort, and money I put into this without hardly any return was worth it.   I wondered if I would ever figure out how to make a go at this affiliate marketing gig.

A couple of weeks ago my wife, who has been very supportive, sat me down and asked my why I continue to spend time and money on affiliate marketing.  All I could say was I still had a goal of making money on the internet.   She reminded me that all I was doing was losing money on the internet.

I realized she was right.  If I had just saved all the money I’ve spent…..

So I decided to make one more shot as this with a membership/service called affiliate article writers.  This service is focused on only article marketing.   I have been a member for about 8 months and this approach is showing some promise.

OK so here’s the deal,  it’s August 25, 2009 and I’ve decide to devote 12 months (starting Sept 1 2009) and $1000 seed money to make one more run at this.   If I don’t start making a profit in this timeframe I’m hanging my internet marketing hat up!

So this blog is going to be about this journey.   Wish me luck!