That benefit isn’t only possible with "news aggregator" sites, video sites or myspace and their clones. You can also get that kind of contribution on your blogs as well. But what if you wanted to blend it in very cleanly with affiliate products/services and have your visitors help you sell those products for you?

Keith James Lock has a great post on how to turn a simple WordPress blog into a user review and ratings site. Not sure how user reviews can help make you money? Well take his personal test site as an example…his Hotels In Windsor blog is converted into a simple and clean user review site. Real people who have stayed at the hotels leave their review and comments. By using TravelNow he then adds affiliate links for people to make reservations at those very hotels being reviewed. In some cases the same people doing the reivews may end up booking more lodging through links so not only do they help with the content but also become great leads. I mean if they took the time to write a review of previous stays, they just might come back to the site to check out other peoples reviews on other places they may stay as well as coming back to leave new reviews.

So, as you can see, it’s an excellent way to get some decent little review sites up and get your visitors to help build the reviews. I think it would work best with really targeted topics/products but you could put one of these sites up for plenty of different things…not just travel. What about a TV review site? Or maybe a video game review site? Everyone has opinons and people love making others hear their opinion lol. So take advatage of that and let them help you make some money .

Check out Review Site How-to post over there to get all the info and learn where to get the plugin to make it easy to turn your WordPress blog into a review site.

So if you think you can use such a database you can get it free over at ZipCodeGuy and all he ask in return is a short post about it. You can bypass that if you would rather and just buy it for just $25 (a huge discount off their normal price).

I also wanted to see if I could grab a small piece of the Christmas rush even though it was a bit late.

Well, even though I completely screwed up the adwords campaign (like having 3 thousand keywords all in the same ad channel) and not knowing how to track anything important I did end up getting some traffic out of it and actually even had some conversions. I’ve learned a lot about setting up keywords and such since so hopefully I will be able to show that in my next post about this.

Beyond not really knowing what I was doing, I was also on a pretty tight budget. With Christmas, being paid only once a month and still trying to adjust to that and just being broke in general I didn’t have a lot to work with. And that is where the comedy begins…or at which point you can point and laugh at me for being a dumbass.

I won’t be real specific with stats but here is the general info for the “campaign”:

I figured I’d try to get some of the traffic that was looking for Nintendo Wiis for Christmas and since there was a short supply in general there seemed to be a decent amount of traffic for finding Wiis. I set up a site similar to the one I posted earlier using the ebay/amazon affilaite plugin for WordPress. I was hoping that there would be a lot of hungry buyers ready to jump on ebay to grab up what was available.

Surprisingly, even with my noob errors and getting by with my blindfold on I was filtering traffic and making sales. Of course not knowing how to setup adwords correctly, not knowing how to optimize my keywords (or even organize them) and not knowing how to know if I was making money or losing money the whole time I wasn’t sure if it was working or not. CJ not having updated stats and ebay not reporting being the best made it worse.

Over the course of the campaign I earned:

$563.57 through CJ for the ebay commissions
$171.74 through amazon for the sales commissions

For a gross of:
$735.31

Not so bad for a noob. Now lets figure out the net…

My adwords charges for the month came out to:

$652.36

Wow, an actual “profit”! If my math is correct I ended up with a positive difference of $82.95! And that is with an obvious non optimized campaign, probably overpaying on keywords and pretty much not knowing what I was doing beyond paying to filter traffic through my site.

So, did I actually profit? Well that is where bing a broke dumbass comes into play and reminds me of what a noob I really am. Being a noob and not planning well, I didn’t know when Google actually charges for adwords fees. I remembered from small promotions in the past when I was just trying to get traffic to various sites that I had been billed (automatic debit/bank draft) after the first of the month for those charges. So I assumed that even though I had a limited budget that I wouldn’t be billed until after the first of the month which, by then, I would have gotten more funds in. Well I was wrong and was billed in the middle of the month a few days before my funds came in! Because I use my debit card for EVERYTHING I had a ton of small pending charges waiting to go though. Things like $5 snacks at the gas station, $8 domain registration and a few small stocking stuff purchases I had made. Well since I didn’t know Google was going to charge me, I didn’t have enough to cover those purchases and the adwords bill at the same time…after all, I was expecting the adwords bill to come after the end of the month.

So I ended up being overdrafted and since my bank chrages per item overdraft, I ended up with 5 overdraft fees at $30 each! They dropped it down to only charging me for 3 of them as a “courtesy” so in the end, my bad planning and lack of funds cost me $90 in band fees.

So let’s do the math and find out my net results…

$82.95 profits from the campaign
$90.00 bank overdraft fees for being a moron
= -$7.05

Yes, I lost money but even so I am pretty happy that in reality my campaign was profitable. Even without fine tuning and optimizing I was able to make it profitable. Was it worth spending $652.36 to bring in $735.31 and only end up with $82.95 (pre dumbass surcharges)
? I don’t know. Profit is profit I guess but it’s not the most efficient method. And of course overspending my budget (even if unintentional) isn’t the smartest thing to do obviously.

So there you have it. My first “real” campaign and the results of being an idiot. Hopefully in my “learn along with me” affiliate marketing: 101 series I’ll be a bit more prepared and be able to show what I have learned. I’m excited to see how much of a difference optimizing and fine tuning will have.

Anyone have any obvious tips on how to avoid being this dumb?

A while back I emailed John asking if he could do product/service reviews for the paid reviews and, of course, he said yes. I didn’t have the cash to pay the crazy hourly rate that a super A-list blogger charges but it was right about that time that fate stepped in and I found the contest on WinningTheWeb. Now I just have to figure out how to bribe John Chow to give a really great positive review and make it all worthwhile!

Want a sneak peak at what I am having John review for me? Well I’m going to tell you anyway…

A while back I signed up for an affiliate network I read about somewhere that seemed a bit different than the usual networks called MoreNiche. After signing up and checking out what they had to offer I noticed rather than having a huge listing of offers they only had a small selection of products and most of those were related to either diet pills or penis extenders of all things. What set them apart though was the amount of resources and help they offered with these products for their affiliates. Each of the offers had a HUGE amount of creative material including all the usual banners and such but also PLR articles, websites and even PLR ebooks that you could edit and distribute. There is also a huge library of help files and how-to ebooks making it almost as much of an “e-course” on how to be an affiliate marketer as it was a network pimping their products.

Although I was very impressed with the amount of support and materials made available, I didn’t have many sites or traffic that would have benefited much form penis extension and the like. Not that that is a bad thing, of course, I just didn’t think my Journeyman fan traffic was really the most targeted for an extra inch or two. Then again, I guess you never know…

Well thankfully, MoreNiche has been busy building up their catalogue of offers and products and expanding into many other very cool niches…you could say MoreNiche was getting into “More Niches”. Or not if you aren’t into stupid obvious puns.

Although there are a few of their new products I am excited about, one particular service really got me excited (no pun intended at all here, seriously). Not just because it could be a good money maker if it converted but also because it is just a really kickass new service, especially for internet marketers who like to know what their traffic is doing. Forget just having analytics. Get over just studying your heatmaps. With ClickTale you get to see exactly what your users are doing on your site with VIDEO. Meaning their actions are all fully recorded while on your site. It’s as if you are looking over their shoulder while they browse your site and you get to see where they hover, what they avoid, what they click and how long it takes them to click and pretty much everything you would want to know about what users actually do on your site. Short of being able to ask them why the hell they aren’t clicking on your ads/offers in person, there isn’t a better way to learn how your users use, or don’t use, your site. It’s incredibly powerful to actually be able to SEE the problems you have and be able to fix them based on that feedback. Sure, analytics are still important but when you are laying out your landing pages or trying to improve your usability there is nothing like being able to actually see how your users get around.

Best part is you can actually try it out for FREE. After signing up at TryClickTale.com you get a free 100 recordings a week for two URLs! Even if you never decide to upgrade, with that much free time you should easily be able to see and learn enough to make some huge improvements to your sites and landing pages.

Yeah, of course I’d like to hype ClickTale because it is an affiliate product but to be completely honest, of everything I have every promoted, ClickTale is by far the coolest and one I actually use and believe in. It really is a huge advantage to be able to learn how users use your site by actually watching them. In my case, I learned that I suck at setting up navigation and regardless how slick I thought I was with my ad integration, I learned my uses were much much smarter than me and avoided a lot of the ads in the beginning.

So, if you want to check it out before you see what John Chow thinks, go ahead and sign up for your free trial at TryClickTale.com. Please let me know what you think of it as well because I really am looking forward to seeing what others think of it.

And if you think it is something you’d like to promote, MoreNiche has some pretty impressive payouts on top of their great support. You can sign up for MoreNiche at JoinMoreNiche.com. Definitely let me know what you think about their network as well. Maybe it’s because I am so new to affiliate marking but I was blown away by the amount of resources they make available for their affiliate.

Now, bring it on John!