Learning Affiliate Marketing together

The reason for this Blog is a learning tool for me to polish and improve my skills. A learning tool for anyone that has very limited computer skills and no experience with Internet marketing. I have recently started this endeavor, and haven't gotten to far. My plan is to bring you up to date on where I am currently at in the process, and then as I make changes or attempt to polish up what I have done already, I will post it to this site.

Now should I run into trouble or a road block, I am going to rely on you all out there to help me out. Those that have sites that deal with what ever issue we are dealing with, are more than welcome to put a link to their site so we can all benefit from it.

Before we get started I want to make one thing clear that I have learned so far. There are a lot of scams and rib-offs out there, so make sure you check everything out before you turn over money to anyone promising to make you rich with little or no effort. First off this has not been easy for me, I have to learn everything and then correct all my mistakes and start from the beginning again. I could do the same thing in two or so hours a day, it would just take me a long time. I am a type "A" kind of person, normally I am working on this stuff for 4 to 6 hours a day. The good thing is if I want to go fishing or something, I go. I will catch back up later, so I can set my own schedule. Also i learned that if this was so easy and anyone could do it, there would be a lot of people quiting their day job. Anyone can do it and can learn it, I can testify to that, but the difference is most people get frustrated, scared or lazy and stop doing it. As long as you keeping going and learning you can make it. After all, even a blind squirrel will find a nut every now and then.



OK, let's get started, the first thing I did was to sit down and figure out what type of site I wanted to do. A blog, a regular style web page, and in what forum I wanted to get in. Well I was in a hurry and decided to do a regular website, on the Internet. I then had to decide what I was going to produce or sell on that site. Products, E-books, Information or anything else that I was interested in or knew something about. Initially, I decided to do a blog to float my idea of gang information. I set up a blog on Blogspot.com. It was easy to do and I did not have to have a lot of technical know how. That was a good thing, not only is my technical knowledge very limited, my general computer skills are on the novice side. They said it takes 20 to 30 minutes to set up and get a blog on line. Well, it took me about two hours, not due to content but due to setting up the blog itself. Once i finished setting up the physical lay-out. I started on the content, which was easy and fun because I knew the subject matter and enjoyed writing about it. The hold back was my typing and spelling, thank the lord for spell check. The first time I submitted my blog it did not go through, I had to retype it correct my spelling and oops and then resubmit it. I sat and watched it ready for the comments to come flowing in, after 30 minutes and no responses, I went to bed. That was about 3 weeks ago, still haven't gotten any responses. I then tried Hubpages, they were easy enough to do and it looked like people actually had sites there and made a lot of comments. So I went to hubpages.com and started a site there, still about gangs and then I later expanded it to articles dealing with California prisons, and one on my dog, Bubba, a Bichon Frise. After completing 10 hubpages, I had one comment, and that was from my daughter, but on the good side I had about 500 visitors to my posts. I then learned about Google AdSense, a way to make money by having advertisements placed on you blog or website. I went to google AdSense.com and sighed up, again it took me about 30 minutes to complete the process, but most people can do it quicker. Sure enough, ads showed up on my blog and related directly to the content of my posts. Needless to say, no one used them. After all how many people wanted to get a pen pal in prison or become a correctional officer or attend drug rehabs. Finally after three weeks I realized my subject just was not working, so it was time to change. I felt I had a good grasp on how to do blogs and was in a hurry to get to making a"real website" or a money making one.



I returned to square one, wrote down a list of ideas that I thought would be marketable. I came up with Home or Personal Electronics, and settled on a limited number of items. HDTV's, MP3 players, I-Pods, GPS systems and Accessories for them. I then had to decide if I was going to do drop-shipping, or an affiliate type marketing. Drop-shipping I would have to find a drop-shipper and spent about four hours searching the Internet for drop-shipping companies. I found several and then decided I did not want to deal with ordering, dealing with stock on hand and then of course there was a cost associated with it. The ones I looked at you either had to purchase the stock and they would retain it in their warehouse until shipped, but they pretty much handled everything, the other did not charge me for the cost of the product until I sold it, which seemed really good, use other peoples money, but they would charge me for the space in their warehouse that my products occupied. I just did not like that, so I decided on an affiliate program. I went to the Internet and went through litterly 100's of websites looking for company's with affiliate programs. I then learned of company's that actually monitor the affiliate programs for the company's and did all the accounting and tracking. Now the catch 22 came up. Before you can enter the affiliate programs you had to have a website for then to check out before the companies would decide if you would get approved for the program. My initial idea was to have four product pages and do a direct or deep link directly to the products. I envisioned, thousands of pictures of Televisions, that customers could click on and go directly to that item and purchase it through the company that the link took them too. I found out that you can do it, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of work. I decided on placing Banners on the website with a short comment above the banner, the customer would click on the banner and go to the company directly to browse their catalog or buy. My whole idea behind my website was that I would spend the time to find the companies that has the products I wanted, put them all in one place, and customers would not have to go to a search directory, click to the company and it they did not find what they wanted they had to go back to the search directory and then redo the process again. I figured if they could go from a website to a company and then back to the website and to another company in two or three clicks without having to spend the time, and frustration of finding what they wanted, it was a good deal. I actual reviewed 100's of websites and 1000's of search engine results, it took about 40 hours of work and it was really frustrating.

There are website builders out there that offer free web building sites. They looked like good deals, but they worried me, I figured there would be a monthly or annual charge that would be high. I decided to go with TriadWebZone, I could get my domain name for $ 10.99 and after 30 days would be charged a modest monthly rate, around $ 35 to $40 a month, it seemed fair so that's the one I decided on. It was fairly straight forward, you just followed the directions, almost like a blog, and bang you had a website that you controlled, and were responsible for. Again, reading the instructions, I put in content about my company, what items would be listed and the idea behind my company. It took a little thought and about another 40 hours or so to get it where I wanted it.

I hate to do this to you, but this is just to much for me to finish now. So I will leave you with a link to my website and with in the next several days, I will do another post to bring us up to the present. If you have any questions on what I have gone through so far just leave it in a comment and I'll get back to you.

See you later.

http://www.TBD-Associates-Electronic-Stores.com