I am taking a little breather from some of my other revenue streams, I wanted to talk about affiliate marketing a bit. I am starting to have a little success with it, and while I am investing small amounts and testing campaigns, it is paying off. But I wanted to give the harsh reality about campaigning, and why most people throw in the towel after a short time.

When you start running things like PPC marketing you can take a huge hit to the pocket book if your not careful. Now I am sure that you have heard of guys making $hundreds of thousands of dollars doing this and said no way. Let me just say yes way dude (remembering Bill and Teds Excellent adventure). You can bank huge, but you have to think way out of the box or you will lose your pants real fast.

I will be the first to tell you that Google adwords can be a tough cookie, but thats where all the huge traffic is, so a lot of guys go for the Gusto. Yahoo on the other hand is a lot easier to game. That brings me to another point. When I use the word “game” I mean it. A large portion of the guys that make the most doing affiliate marketing through search, PPC and CPM are gaming the system. Just study up a bit and you can see that they are. Almost every other ad out there that I see is against Google Adwords TOS which makes me sick sometimes, especially when I see how truly sly and shady they are. But it takes some shady tactics to be successful with this.

As I said before, I am just getting in this game, but here are a few things I am learning and want to pass along to you if you should decide to jump in. Apply them and you will succeed if you keep at it and can come up with fresh ideas and study hard.

1. Test, Test, Test - testing helps you to tweak a campaign to cause it from making no money or breaking even to actually profiting many times.
2. Spend money to make money - You can’t expect for your first campaign to succeed and profit. 90% of the campaigns you test may make no money. Wait till you find the right one and then squeeze the living daylight out of its earning potential.
3. Think outside of the box with keywords - Everyone that runs PPC campaigns seems to copy each others keywords. If everyone uses the same ones then who benefits? only the guy at the top of the ads pile. Try to use terms that are related to your product not always the obvious.
4. DON’T give up - People fail because they lose money and don’t keep trying. You are going to lose, thats for sure. Just don’t give up. When you run a campaign and it fails then just try a new one.
5. Try to break even - If you break even on a campaign or come close, then don’t walk away from it. You have hit a gold mine. All you have to do is tweak your ads, tweak your keywords, and you should be profiting in no time. Keep testing until you go in the plus.

It has been a while since I posted. I have been really sick for a while, and haven’t been doing  as much as I would like to be doing. I wanted to add a little something today, now that I have been actually coming back to the regular activities of life the last 2 days. Vic had a recent post about Niche blogging, and there is something I want to point out that I have been learning and still learn sometimes.

I know a lot of you have some great blogs out there, and love what you write about, but it is so important to not put all your eggs in one basket. Now I know I have mentioned that before, but I really mean it. Below is a list of the things I have been dabbling in, and I feel if you are working online to make money, then you need to really give all these avenues some consideration.

• Niche Blogging
• Local Blogging
• Affiliate marketing
• Social Marketing
• Forums

If you focus on one particular income stream, then you are setting yourself up for instability. The reason being is that there is no one thing that is stable. Your blog could be gone tomorrow.

If you think that having a bunch of niche blogs will just be fine, and that you will make money in this way for the next 10 years, don’t fool yourself. These streams of income could be gone for you tomorrow for one reason or another.  There is no real security on the internet, and I have seen whole businesses flop over night.

This is why it is so important to learn multiple things. By learning new ways to make money online, then you can be versatile, and you can be ready in case one stream of revenue dries up for you.

Ok this post may be called unethical by some, so if you read this and are offended, then I am sorry. I will just ask that you leave your, “thats not right” comment, or you can take this to heart and use it to not only help yourself but your friends as well. Ok, you have read about Vic telling you to build a blogging empire right? So how do you get good backlinks?

Well if you are not one of these silly people that look at what number is showing in the Google toolbar and base everything off of the Google updated PR then you are in business. If you are a person that just adores that little number that shows you have a PR 3 or PR5 blog or website, and lve by it then just go ahead and stop reading. For those of you that don’t really care about that bar and realize it really doesn’t reflect a current PR always, then please keep reading.

Ok, domains are a dime a dozen right? yes they are, and you can pick them up with good PR showing up for them off of TDnam. Just make sure its real and not fake. Ok so lets say we pick up a PR 5 domain. We search in Google and have no idea why its a PR 5 domain. Well thats because before it expired previously, it may have had some good links coming into. You may find that these links are gone now, but all that remains is the number in the PR toolbar that shows something good.

Ok well guess what? There are idiots out there that will adore this. they will think your site has so much value. As a matter of fact they will be willing to trade with you. If they have a PR 4 domain and their site is relevant, DO IT!!! Your site really doesn’t have that PR they think it does. now for people that will check your site a bit more, you will want to add a bunch of posts, tag the domain a bunch, and also get some real relevant links. then you will approach someone for a link trade. If they have a PR3 or PR4 I say go for it. If you didn’t get any links or trade at all and just let the next Google PR update come by, that domain may just drop down to a 0 or at most a 3 if you have a lot of content and some PR0 links.

By trading with sites that may have a PR4 or 5 if you can, this will possibly even help you to hold your ranking and pass on that juice to some other site. you get my point. Whether you want to do this or not is up to you. It is your choice, and everyone is entitled to that. All I am telling you is that this is just another method that some people use.