How I Got Into Internet Marketing (Part 2)
September 28, 2007
This is the story of how I got to where I am today in internet marketing. Part 1 of the story was posted earlier.
Picking up where I left off a couple of days ago…I finished creating my first adsense sites and I was looking forward to the development of my new revenue stream. The problem I found though was that I just wasn’t getting enough traffic to make any money. Being a newbie with website promotion, I had no idea how difficult it was to drive sustainable traffic to a site. Using adsense as my only revenue source made things even worse because it literally takes thousands of visitors to make a decent income. All of sudden my hopes were dashed and I was back to square one.
I experimented with directory submissions and article writing to try and drive a steady flow of traffic to my websites, but when you have five new sites it can literally take up all of your time. It really didn’t seem worth it to break my back to earn $1 or $2 a day per site (10 cents a click doesn’t add up very quickly). I wasn’t interested in making extraordinary sites, I wanted visitors to NOT find what they were looking for and subsequently click on my ads. The bottom line was…I wanted to find a more automated source of income, not something I had fret over.
I gave up on my websites and dreams for about a month. It was during the holidays and there were plenty of other distractions in my life. But as much as I tried to forget about my internet aspirations, something kept calling me back. I had enough experience reading forums and blogs to know that there were thousands of people making decent money online and I wanted to be one of them.
After the holidays were over I decided to buckle down and do some more research. I realized the errors in my previous strategies and I thought I could capitalize on my knowledge of what didn’t work. After a few weeks of reading everything I could find about making money online, I decided to switch strategies away from adsense and into affiliate marketing. This was the best move I ever made.
I had read quite a few people boasting about how much they were earning with an affiliate company named Clickbank. Almost all of their products were ebooks, which made me a little skeptical about their marketability. Nonetheless, I decided to give it a shot. The products paid $10 to $50 per sale, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I could trump my adsense earnings with only one sale. I began my search for a target product and eventually settled on one.
