My Interview With An Internet Marketing Expert

About 6 weeks ago my wife Jill and I went to a couples night out dinner for a local Homeschooling group. At the dinner I met a homeschooling Dad who earns his living entirely online (something most of us would like to do). His name is Austin C. Davis and he runs over 100 websites. His two most popular sites are auro related sites that bring in consisent traffic for keywords like, Car insurance Atlanta, Car Insurance Dallas and the like.

The following is an interview I did with Austin, that I am sure you will enjoy…

Q. Austin, how did you get started in Internet Marketing?

A. I wanted to work from home by myself, make my own hours, not have to actually sell anything, like on Ebay, home school my kids and travel with my family. That pretty much narrowed things down to online stock trading…which I did for a while and lost money, and building a website and promoting products and services that someone else would mail out and take all the responsibility for.

I quit my day job, which is funny because I was the owner of a family auto repair shop in Houston TX that my grandfather started in 1937. I left the company and my father came out of retirement to take over. I knew nothing about the Internet and how to build a website or what and how to sell online, but I was determined and that is all that mattered.

I sat down at my computer and started to learn HTML, SEO stuff, link building skills, how to get listed in top positions in the search engines, how to become an affiliate for other web marketers etc. etc. etc. It took me about a year to really get everything under my belt…but I did EVERYTHING myself which I do NOT recommend. There are tons of places online now that can show you how to build a site, find products and start promoting them very quickly.

I had no idea what an affiliate marketer was so I had to start from scratch, and I was afraid to spend money on education, so it took me a longer time than it should have to get up and running and making a profit.

Q. If you don’t mind sharing, could you let us know what are the favorite sites you work on and why?

A. Sure, I have a direct relationship with an auto insurance company and they are my top revenue producer for me. Google adsense is my second largest revenue producer, then Alldata which is an online auto repair manual program that pays me per new subscriber. Clearly Adsense is the easiest and fastest to implement, but the days of large per click pay outs might be gone.

A year ago there where many, many marketers that were making $10,000 + a month easily with Adsense. I personally know of a handful of marketers that were making well over $50,000 a month JUST in Adsense.

If you can get a direct relationship with an advertiser, you will probably get more money and have more access to statistics and banners etc. than if you used a third party provider like http://www.cj.com which I still use, but look for a direct advertiser first. If you have a quality site, generate a fair amount of traffic and can prove to be worth the extra effort for the advertiser…you should not have a problem asking the advertiser directly.

Q. From the polls I have run on this blog, one of the top questions people have about Internet Marketing is “How do I get more traffic to my website?” Can you give us a brief description of one of your favorite methods to generate traffic to your site?

A. Hands down, KEYWORD RESEARCH! Most site owners make sites and post to their blogs about topics that they as the site owner THINK are of interest to the reader. I do things backwards. I do my keyword research FIRST, find the most traffic for the search term, then I will Google the actual keyword phrase to check out my competition.

I want to get on the top 10 on the first page…or I won’t waste my time making the webpage. So, an example would be the phrase “New Jersey Auto Insurance” and according to http://www.goodkeywords.com using the Overture search engine I see the search volume for that phrase just last month and just on the Overture search engine had about 1059 searches. Now that is JUST Overture, so I take that number and multiple by 5 to include the other top search engines Like Google, Yahoo and MSN ( I count Google twice because of its large search size). So in this example I can estimate about 5500 monthly searches or about 180 daily searches for the phrase “New Jersey Auto Insurance” .

Now I will take the phrase “New Jersey Auto Insurance” and do a Google search to look at my competition. I am looking to see how many sites are Top Level sites, meaning the main page of the site is what Google returned. i.e. http://www.trustmymechanic.com is the top level and www.trustmymechanic.com/newjersey_auto_insurance.html is a secondary page within the site.

If the top 10 competitors are all top level sites…my chances of beating them from my secondary page is going to be very tough, and I would look for other keyword phrases to compete against.

Now, if you did the Google search for New Jersey Auto Insurance, you probably found my page http://www.trustmymechanic.com/newjersey_auto_insurance.html and if you noticed the title of the page, not the title of the article on the page….the actual title of the page you can see what other keywords I am targeting and how I used them in my title so it still reads well, but will pick up on all the varieties of the phrase I wanted to target. Which are

· NJ car insurance

· NJ auto insurance

· New Jersey Car Insurance

· Car insurance NJ

· Auto insurance NJ

If you add up all the potential free search traffic from those keyword phrases it is well over 10,000 monthly potential visitors from those searches. My page http://www.trustmymechanic.com/newjersey_auto_insurance.html gets returned on Google using many of those phrases because I themed the page correctly for each phrase AND I have links from other websites linking to that page using those phrases in the anchor text. The anchor text is what the visitor clicks on, like “Click Here” except I get my link partners to link to that page with “NJ Car insurance” which in turn gives me link popularity credit on the search engines. The more links I can get pointing to that page…the higher the search results I will go.

So the moral to the story is that ONE page on my site http://www.trustmymechanic.com/newjersey_auto_insurance.html is now getting listed in the top 10 results on the first page in the major search engines AND is making money. Incidentally I made that page about 2 years ago doing my keyword research I found that most major auto insurance companies DID NOT write policies in NJ. There is some whacky law that the big insurance companies don’t like, so they just don’t write auto insurance policies in NJ. I got on the phone, and spent days on the internet tying to find an advertiser that WOULD accept NJ traffic and built a relationship with them.

Keyword research is tricky and time consuming, but if you do it right….you will be rewarded handsomely. Don’t forget misspellings in your keyword research….I would bet more than 30% of the search volume contains a misspelling. I purposely add the misspelling and the proper spelling within the articles like this popular page on my site http://myhonestmechanic.com/articles/pontiac-soltice.shtml

I went to the Houston car show early this year and took my own pictures and made my own car review from all the free literature they pass out. You would not believe how many new vehicles that are coming on the market that are prime candidate for misspellings. Think about the visitor and how they might misspell the words you are trying to target. According to the Goodkeywords.com program almost 200 people using Overture last month searched for “break pad” instead of brake pad. 130 searched for nsurance instead of insurance….take these search volume numbers and multiple by 5 to represent the other engines and you can easily see a LARGE amount of easy search traffic that can be picked up utilizing the same articles on your site..

Q. Another thing people always seem to want to know how to do better is monetizing their site. Could you tell us about one of your best money making techniques?

A. From what I see, most webmasters make it too difficult for the visitor to take the action the site owner wants them to do. If you want me to enter my zip code and get a free online auto insurance quote, tell me that upfront on the center of the page…get my attention, make a compelling reason WHY I should get a quote in the first place and why should I get it from YOUR site? Don’t be afraid to be a little pushy. People read a webpage very quickly usually just skimming the content of the page looking for the information they typed in the search engine….make it easy for them.

Back to the NJ auto insurance page from above, look at the page text…I reinforce the same keywords you used to get to the page via Google…it’s my page title with a BIG testimonial from me telling you why you should get a quote from my site and all the reasons why I made the page in the first place….to HELP you find good insurance, because I have already done my research and can save you lots of time and frustration. Bulleted lists work very very well!!

If you have an affiliate program that will allow incentives ( you will give the visitor something in exchange for them doing something for you) then you should make your incentive offer irresistible to the visitor, and your incentive offer must be something they visitor will perceive as valuable and worth their time and effort. Like on my NJ auto insurance page, I will give a free copy of my ebook explaining how they can lower their car repair expenses….its something that is on the same lines as lowering their auto insurance…so the visitor sees value there and takes me up on my offer.

Here are a few good places to find incentive allowable affiliate programs, http://www.modernclick.com (owned by a friend of mine) and http://www.bulletads.com among many other affiliate programs you can Google to locate.

Q. You mentioned to me that you have tons of Internet Marketing products. What is your favorite one? Knowing what you know now, would you have bought as many products as you did or would you have different buying habits?

A. I think I learned the most from Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins, both are super nice and very knowledgeable guys. Here is their latest venture http://www.instantseoexpert.com/ which QUICKLY sold out. The offer lots of really great info for free! I still buy online marketing ebooks all the time, I want to stay on top of what others are doing and if I can learn just one new idea from a $97 ebook…its more than worth it to me. There are lot of SEO tricks out there, but to be totally honest….keyword research, having good unique content, getting inbound links to your page from other quality sites AND having an affiliate program that will convert visitors to customers is 95% of the game.

Q. If you could only give one piece of advice to someone just starting out in Internet Marketing, what would it be?

A. Find your niche, do your keyword research and consistently add great unique content to your site on a daily basis. The visitors will bookmark your site, tell their friends about you and others will begin to find your site valuable as well. I am giving a BBC radio interview later today, they found me via a Google search and from a recommendation of a listener of their show. If your site helps the visitor…you will be successful.

Q. What do you consider to be the most important thing you have done to increase your online income?

Without a doubt, taking the time to do my keyword research BEFORE I make a new website or even a new page on my websites.

Q. Are there any other things you would like to tell someone just starting out?

Find someone in your area who is making money online whom you can meet with on a regular basis for lunch to discuss new ideas, get your ideas and sites critiqued. You can find people online on the webmaster forum boards pretty easily. I would also spend the money and the effort to go to a few SEO seminars like the http://bigseminar.com/ and http://bradfallon.com/. I have been to both of them and have met and interacted with both marketers…..and learned A LOT from them in a short period of time. Don’t be afraid to ask other marketers. I visit a lot of SEO seminars and trade shows and I ALWAYS hand out lots of my business cards with my email and website address. You never know who you will run into and how it can benefit you later on down the road.

Jill has a new blog - Natural Product Reviews!

This weekend I set up a new blog for my wife Jill and her friend Laura called Natural Product Reviews.

I have been putting this off for at least 6 months, but it didn’t take long at all to set up. Jill bought the wordpress template for their blog from template monster. It’s really nice and professional looking. We were originally going to try a free template, but we stumbled across the paid templates and decided to go with one of them. I made a few changes to it and have a few more changes left to make.

I think in the long term it will be a really good blog for Jill and Laura, because using natrual products is something they both have a big interest in. Also, they are both very passionate about using natural products, so their passion will show up in their blog posts.

Another good thing about their new blog is that it is a more focused niche than Natural Family News, which I think will make it easier for them to get regular readers.

Also, it should not be too hard for them to establish some initial traffic to the site. So many of our friends are also into natural products, which will give them some good word of mouth traffic to the blog. Plus, Jill and Laura already have a small community built up with their Natural Family News blog, most of whom will be interested in their new blog as well.

The last thing I wanted to say about their new blog is that at this point it is monetized with Adsense only, but once it is established they may find other ways to monetize it.

Where Oh Where Should my Google Ads Go?

I have been having an interesting discussion in the comments for this post on Blog the Internet.

We are having a disagreement on the placement of advertising on blogs and websites.

As I stated in the comments, the thing that annoys me the most are ads that are placed in the middle of an article. Vexation from peevelog likes the ads in the middle of articles. Gary from Blog the Internet hates ads at the top of articles. I have run across some people who hate ALL ads.

That’s one of the problems with advertising in general. Nobody really wants to look at a lot of it, we all have our limits and preferences regarding how advertising is handled, but without it how do businesses make money?

From my personal testing, ads at the top of articles pay me the most money. This is why I currently place ads in the top of my posts using the java script I developed a while back.

So what do you think? Does it matter to you where the ads are placed?

Go vote on my new poll.

Instant Adsense Templates vs. SBI

Anna commented on a previous post about this article that compares Joel Comm’s Instant Adsense Templates with Ken Envoy’s SBI. It is an interesting comparison, but I think it’s comparing apples with oranges.

Ken Envoy’s SBI is a great way to get started making money. It is basically, a suped up web host. Along with web hosting, there are built in templates, tools and ebooks to help you make money on the net. As I have said before, I love all his free ebooks and think they are must read for newbies.

On the other hand, Instant Adsense Templates are templates designed to maximize the money you can make from Adsense. There is a ton of other stuff Joel is throwing in, like private label rights ebooks, 400 pages of content, etc…

The big differences between SBI and Instant Adsense Templates is that SBI provides web hosting and incredible tools. Whereas Instant Adsense Templates provides tons of templates (way more than SBI) and tons of free content.

If I were to buy Instant Adsense Templates it would be primarily for the free content, and the custom templates that I could use with the web host of my choosing. If I were to buy SBI it would be for their custom tools, web hosting, and easy to build sites.

While similar, SBI and Instant Adsense Templates are different and both can be very useful, depending on your goals. They could even be combined, because SBI allows you to upload your own code if you want to.

Example of a Great Sales Letter

If you haven’t seen Joel Comm’s sales letter for Instant Adsense Templates go check it out quick before he takes it down. It’s pretty amazing.

There were two things I noticed that were a bit odd:

1. I don’t recall ever reading the number that he is limiting this too.
Did I miss something? Last time Joel limited the release to 2000 people. This time the sales letter mentions that there is a limit, but I don’t recall ever seeing what the limit is. Either I am missing something or Joel is doing a great job of creating a feeling of scarcity without there being a “set in stone” limit on the number being released.

2. When Joel starts throwing numbers out about the price the sales letter gets a little confusing.
At first when I saw that he was selling them for $1997 I thought that the price was a bit on the high side, considering what he sold his last templates for. I could see how one might get confused at that point and bail out before realizing the REAL price he is selling them at.

That said I almost instantly bought them. You know what makes this offer so hard to resist?

There are two things:

1. The sheer volume of stuff he is giving away makes this offer so hard to resist.
By the time you finish reading the sales letter you think to yourself, “Did he say I am getting a kitchen sink out of this?”

2. The way the sales page answers every question I could ask.
I think Joel answers just about every question I had about his product. He must have recieved great feedback on his first product and used that to answer any objections people might have.

Those are the two things that stood out (to me) in his sales letter. It is a great example of a sales letter that works.

I can’t recall another package that seemed to give away so much value for such a cheap price. That said, I haven’t bought it yet, because it doesn’t fit my current business plans/goals. Which is why I wanted to say:

BE SURE ANY PRODUCT YOU BUY FITS YOUR GOALS/PLANS BEFORE YOU BUY IT.

Lastly, if you want to learn the basics of creating a sales letter that sells, I suggest you take a look at this article by Yanik Silver that breaks down an example sales letter and explains how it works. It includes examples of the two things that Joel is doing that made his sales letter so good (answering objections, giving away bonuses).

Instant Adsense Templates Take 2

Joel Comm will release a new version of Instant Adsense Templates today at noon. Last time they sold out in less than 48 hours. So if you are the least bit interested you might want to take a look at what he is offering in this package soon.

While I have not looked at his new templates (like I did with the last ones), there are two things I would like to point out before you consider buying them.

1. My guess is that you will still need to alter the content you get from him. I wouldn’t just use the same exact content you get with these templates.

2. You will probably need to know a little about HTML and uploading pages to a web server, that sort of thing, before you can use them. It’s not like SiteSell where you can create websites without any HTML or design skils.

That said it does sound like Joel has some interesting features in store. You can check out the details by clicking here.

Cha-cha-cha-changes July 7th week in review

Didn’t do a whole lot of work on any of the businesses this week, but there were a few changes for me this week.

The website for the business my wife and brother-in-law were creating is on hold, beause my brother-in-law is in negotiations to by the entire sealer business from the person we were going to be drop shipping from. So that business is on hold for us. This frees up some time for me over the next couple of weeks (which is a good thing).

We had a problem with the homeschooling wiki yesterday. Our web host changed something that made it so that we couldn’t edit pages. They fixed the problem quickly. I have been very happy with them for web hosting, because they always respond quickly to our questions.

It was interesting to see how Joel Comm launched his Instant Adsense Templates. He sold out of them in about 24 hours. I learned a few things about launching a new product from watching what he did. I don’t particularly like the limited supply (scaricity) hook he used, but it makes sense from both a customer point of view and a marketing point of view. From a customer point of view, you don’t want to have the web saturated with your template and similar content. From a marketing point of view, it helps you make sales if your customers have an incentive to buy now. Yanik Silver taught me that you will lose a lot of sales if your customers don’t have a reason to buy your product immediately. This is why so many businesses have limited offers, time sensitive offers, various sales, etc. It gives you a reason to buy now.

Anyway, next week I will probably spend most of the week working on promoting our homeschool wiki. Have a nice weekend…

Instant Adsense Templates Released - What are My Thoughts?

I hope everyone here in the States had a happy fourth (we did). Last night, we went out in the rain and shot of fireworks with the kids. I will never forget the expression on my four year old son’s face when he told me how much fun he was having. Not only was he getting to watch us light fireworks, but he was also getting to play in the rain. What could be better than that? Kids are amazing!

Anyway, I wanted to let you know that Joel Comm’s Instant Adsense Templates are out. Here are my latest thoughts on the templates:

1. The price is great for the first 1000, and ok for the second 1000 people.
2. Since 2000 people are getting these templates you will definitely need to change the content that is provided.
3. This is excellent for people who are not very web savvy and/or less creative and/or want to get some free content.
4. They are going to sell out fast.

If I buy the templates I would use them almost strictly for the content. I might wind out using a few of the blog or forum templates, but for the most part I would take the 2,413 pages of content, change it and create a blog or website with it.

I don’t think these templates are for everyone. I think that you MUST change the content in the templates to get your best use of them. You will also want to add some additional content and find a way to make your site unique (maybe by providing a free forum, blog or something else to go along with the website).

That said, I am seriously considering purchasing the Adsense templates for my personal use. I can see how they would come in handy and the early bird 197 dollar price is very hard to beat. I don’t think they are for everybody, but I can see some good ways that I could put them to use. Obviously, if I buy them I am not going to want to give away too much about what I do with them. But in general I would take the content alter it slightly, add to it and create a new site and/or ebook with the content.

Anyway, those are my initial thoughts on the templates, based both on the sales letter and my sneak peek at some of the templates. You can click here to see the sales page for yourself.

Later…

Quick Business Update for The Last Week in June 2006

With a long fourth of July weekend fast approaching for me (at my 9-5 job we have to take the third off as vacation and get the 4th off as a holiday), I thought it would be a good idea to go ahead and post about this past business week.

This week has been busy from the start. I have been working on our new wiki, our concrete sealer site. Not to mention, the other day Joel Comm of Adsense Secrets fame, gave me the chance to sneak preview his new Instant Adsense Templates. How could I say no to that? Sure I was busy, but I had to take a look at them.

Anyway, things have been very busy this week. I plan on focusing most of my attention on the new homeschooling wiki and the concrete sealer site for the next couple of weeks.

That’s it for now, for those of you in the US I hope you have a Happy Fourth!

Instant Adsense Templates Sneak Preview

Joel Comm contacted me the other day and gave me a special sneak preview at his soon to be released Instant Adsense Templates. They are really awesome…

I bet the price is going to be very expensive. Unfortunately, Joel (like many Internet Marketers are doing these days) is limiting the supply. So once I know the price I won’t have that much time to decide.

As far as the product is concerned, I was very happy with the quality of the templates that I got to download. I also really liked the fact that there were templates for all kinds of content based sites, including blogs, and forums. Most importantly I was happy with all the pre-developed content that Joel is giving away. In fact, the main reason I am considering buying the templates is for the content. Anyway, you may want to sign up for Joel’s advanced notification list to find out more about the templates.

500 Dollar Contest on Our New Wiki

We just started a contest for our new Homeschool wiki.

Starting July 10th 2006 12:01am CST and ending August 10th 2006 11:59pm CST our new homeschool wiki will be holding a contest to give away $500 in a random drawing.

To enter the 500 dollar drawing an individual must visit http://knowhomeschooling.com, register, and submit a major edit. More details are available here.

The site has already recieved a lot of attention from the homeschooling community (of which we are part). It has been a very eye-opening experience.

What is great about this drawing/contest is that it will:

1. Drive a good amount of viral traffic to the site.
2. Add content to our wiki.
3. Allow us to give back to the community by awarding someone 500 dollars.

It’s a win/win/win situation for all in invloved.

The homeschooling community seems very excited to have a homeschooling wiki and we are very excited to be helping out the homeschooling community. Plus we get the side benefit of making money with Google Adsense along the way.

I can see now why so many people say “Do what you love, the money will follow.”

I will let you know how things go as the contest progresses. I really think the 500 dollars will turn out to be a great investment. Time will tell…

Free blogging with Adsense Ebook Available Until July 5th

I thought I should write a quick post to let you know that Joel Comm of Adsense Secrets is giving away a free ebook called “Blogging and Google Adsense” if you sign up to be on his Instant Adsense Templates advanced notice list.

I have only given the book a quick scan, but it looks like it would be of value to beginners. Prior to now, Joel has only made the book available to his paying Premier club members. It includes sections on how to add Adsense to Blogger, WordPress, and Movable Type, along with Adsense optimization tips and more.

The book is only free up until the July 5th launch of his new product. So if you are interested you should click here and go download it before July 5th, 2006.

Adsense Templates - What a Great Idea

Remember back a few months ago, when I said that I wish I had come up with an idea like the affiliate classroom?

Well, I have come across another one of those great ideas.

Joel Comm the creator of the book Adsense Secrets, has announced that he is launching a new product called Instant AdSense Templates.

What a great idea!

Coming up with a niche like that is a great way to make money. He is creating a new resource that has no competition, and presumably has a good demand. It’s a perfect niche!

Anyway, I thought I would pass it along as an excellent example of finding a perfect niche business. There are probably many people who can do web design, and who know how to make money with Adsense. What a great idea to put the two together and create Adsense Templates. I imagine Joel will make a killing from these.

Evil Web Portals

About once every couple of weeks someone sends me a new “get rich” ebook that they want me to review. So far, I have turned most of these opportunities down for various reasons.

Anyway, last week someone gave me an ebook to review that looked very promising. So, I told them I would go ahead and review it. The first few chapters were REALLY good. Then I got to the meat of the system – setting up useless web portals (monetized with Adsense and affiliate programs) that trick the Search Engines using black hat SEO techniques to get traffic.

Ummm… No thanks!

When I read the part about keeping the portal website up until the Search Engines ban the site, I thought to myself,

“I can’t believe they are teaching people this. Especially unsuspecting beginners.”

I am not going to reveal the book’s name or author, because I think they might believe it is a legitimate way to make money on the web. Yes, some perfectly nice people make money this way. But I don’t believe that constantly trying to trick the Search Engines with the latest technique is the way to build up a legitimate business. I for one, just couldn’t live with myself knowing I was contributing to cluttering the Search Engines with garbage results.

Anyway, if you ever purchase a book about creating multiple web portals to trick the Search Engines, promptly return it to get your money back. If someone ever tells you that creating these junk portals is the way to get rich quick, run far, far away.

Making Decisions Easier

Over the next couple of weeks I am working on analyzing my business direction and deciding what to do next. Brainstorming business ideas and making decisions like this one have become a lot easier. I found a great free tool from SiteSell that helps you answer questions like the ones I have.

It’s kind of funny that I found this tool, because I was just thinking that I needed a tool like this. Anyway, it’s called Choose It and it’s WAY COOL!

I took it for a test run to see what would happen and here are my results.

First, I had to decide what I wanted to choose between. So I decided to try and find out what would be the best type of business for me start if I were to start another online business. (Note: for this quick test I didn’t put in all the questions that I would really need to ask.)

On the opening screen of Choose It you are asked to type in a question. My question was:

What should my next online business be?

Then I clicked the right arrow to go to the next screen. The next screen had a list of answers. For testing purposes I typed in the following answers:

1. another blog
2. adsense website
3. ebook
4. consulting business
5. forum

Then I clicked the right arrow to go to the next screen. The next screen asks you to list what is important to you and next to each answer score how important it is on a scale of 1-100. For testing purposes I used this post as guideline for my answers. I typed in the following things:

1. time – 90
2. $1000/day – 90
3. wife and I work together on – 80
4. Enjoy doing it – 80

Then I clicked the right arrow to go to the next screen. The next screen asks you to score each answer.

Click here to see a screen shot of how I scored each answer.

Then I clicked the right arrow to go to the next screen. The next screen shows you the results. Here is a screen shot of the results:

As you know, I am involved in quite a few things right now, so it will probably be another 6 months (at least 2 months) until I start up a new business. Also, if this weren’t a test run I would factor in more things into my business decision. I would add more possible online business ideas, and break them down into their niches. The list might look something like this (just an example):

adsense informational site on hummingbirds
adsense forum for hummingbird enthusiast
adsense dating site for Illegal Immigrants
paid forum for UFO abductees
membership site for Ant lovers
NFL football blog
homeschooling blog for Dads
ebook about homeschooling for Dads
ebook about the treatment and care of Cheetahs

From my test run you can see how cool this decision making tool is. I really enjoyed using it and plan on using it soon, because I have a lot of business decisions to make over the next couple of months and I can see how this will really help me make those decisions.

Podcast for Riches

Last night, I listened to the podcast interview of Markus Frind who makes 10,000 dollars a day from Adsense. Go listen to it for free here.

I found out about the excellent free podcast from Darren Rowse’s post here.

Markus gave out some excellent information. In case you don’t remember, Markus is the guy who I wrote about in this post. I also wrote a newsletter breaking down some of his advice. He has some great advice for all of us looking to make lots of money online.

Quick and Easy Way to Make More Money with Google Adsense

So many people who get started using Google Adsense are not making nearly as much money as they could be. I have several tips for those of you out there who have a low CTR (click through rate), to help you increase both your click through rate and the amount of money you are making.

I have used these techniques to nearly triple our earnings from Adsense and I know of others who have done the same thing. So here are my Adsense tips:

First, visit Google’s heat map and ALWAYS keep it in mind when positioning your ads.

Second, you need to make the background color of your Adsense ads (both the link units and regular ads) the same as the background color of your site. You also need to remove the borders, by making them the same color as the background.

Third, I have found that the best performing Google Adsense ads are the 300×250 and the 336×280 ads rectangle ads. I have switched to using rectangle ads on most of my sites and find them to produce the best results.

Now, for the most important thing. Ads above the fold will perform best. Ads that are above the fold are ads that you don’t have to scroll down to see. You can see this on Google’s heat map.

All this being said, not everyone likes to position ads in the highest click through rate location, because they feel it doesn’t look good. Our visitors have never commented on it and we get plenty of comments on our blogs, plus lots of positive feedback, so it doesn’t seem to be a problem. Moving the ads from the bottom of the post to the top of the post nearly tripled our click through rate on the four blogs we have tested this on. So it was definitely worth it to us.

For an example of where we place our ads and how they blend in, here are two of our blogs one is three columns the other one is two columns:

http://myvegetarianrecipeoftheday.com/

http://www.naturalfamilynews.com/

We have tested placing Google Adsense ads below and above the posts, above performed way better! I have never found a better position for the ads, although many experts say the best place to put them is in the left sidebar.

After following the above advice, an online friend of ours saw her Adsense earning triple!

Hope this helps you as much as it has us!

Results of My Traffic Exchange Experiment

I just couldn’t do it very long. I tried Traffic Swarm and just was not impressed. I kind of expected that it wouldn’t bring any good traffic to my site. When I tried it I realized that most people probably have a hard time spending any time looking at the other sites, because they want to get on to the next site and earn more credits.

Anyway, it also looks like it might violate Google’s TOS to use these traffic exchange systems with adsense sites which is another reason it really does not appeal to me.

That’s it for now, just wanted to let you know that I was not a big fan of traffic exchanges going into this experiment and now I am even less of a fan.

More High Paying Adsense Words

After just having posted about high paying keywords last week, today I found this post via ThreadWatch.

It is a list of the top 230 highest paying keywords from CyberWyre. I don’t know that I would be interested in creating a site using any of these terms, but then again for around $50 a click maybe I should find a specialist in consolidating loans or a mortgage specialist or better yet a mesothelioma lawyer who wants to start a blog.

Anyway, maybe the list will give you some ideas for your next site or blog.

Making Money Online Series

I plan on starting a series of posts that will discuss different ways to make money online and what I think about them. In case you can’t wait for the series, I thought I would let you know that my favorite way to make money online is Affiliate Marketing. In particular using the techniques that I learned in the book:

The Affiliate Master’s Handbook by Ken Envoy.

Additionaly, I love Google Adsense. It is great! For those of you looking for good Adsense keywords to design a website around you will want to check out these two websites:

1. http://www.iotaweb.org/ – Free tool to search for high paying adsense terms.

2. Keyword Explosion – Database of 2.4 MILLION high paying niche keyword database. It is a great resouce for people looking for high paying keywords to profit on.

Anyone who has success with a particular system/book/training/etc. feel free to tell me your online succes story and we can discuss using it in my upcoming series about making money online.

That’s it for now…

Making a Million Dollars Online With Adsense

Very interesting post on webmasterworld about someone from Canada who made 1 million dollars in 3 months from Adsense. He gives some very good advice in his posts.

You can read some excellent insight into the design of his site here.

Definitely worth checking out.

Our total profits are…

I just calculated the total profits so far from our Olympics blog, and the total is…

$3,201.19

Most of that was made this month and not all of it was from Adsense. During the Olympics, it was averaging between $100 and $200/day of total profit.

In the near future I will be writing about the top things I learned from this experience. In the meantime, I am busy creating several new blogs for my wife, including some geared towards tv shows we really enjoy and a personal blog for Jill. The personal blog probably won’t make much money, but I think that people will really enjoy reading it, because Jill is such a good writer and Jill will really enjoy writing on it. It won’t really be about the money, but who knows maybe she will earn some money from it as well.

How Google determines the Order of Adsense Ads

Did you ever wonder why certain Adsense ads appear above other ads on your site?

The Google Adsense Blog has just answered that question. Excellent post for those who just have to know why? Click here to read the explanation?

Hope that proves helpful.

Google Adsense Optimization Tips for Blogs

I am little late on this story, but I and my family have been ill this week. Google’s Adsense blog recently came up with their optimization tips for bloggers here.

My two favorite blogs dedicated to the business of blogging have posted their thoughts on this optimization chart. Darren Rowse (of Problogger) wrote his respone here and Nick Wilson of Performancing posted his comments here.

My only comment is that most bloggers report the best performance when ads are in their left navigation and when the ads blend in with their navigation (same color background, etc.). I have found the ads to perform well when they are in the content, blend in with the content, and are above the fold. But keep in mind I have not thoroughly tested ads in the left navigation yet.

Chitika Audit Complete

I just read over at Jensense that Chitika has completed their revenue auditing for November and December of 2005. I was happy to see that my audited revenues were only 9.5 percent lower than my unaudited revenues.

So here are my thoughts on Chitika vs. Google Adsense…

Google Adsense is MUCH better than Chitika. If you are going to use Chitika, I recommend using your prime web real estate for Adsense ads and that you place Chitika ads in other places that make sense.

Chitika has had a lot of bad press. They probably should have waited to roll out their services until their processes were better. However, their ad system is very unique and I like the way Chitika ads work. I just hope that Chitika can vastly improve their services (really soon). Otherwise, they may not stay afloat very long.

Google Adsense Tip - Keep your content targeted

Google Adsense is a GREAT way to make money online as an affiliate. I am very happy with it. However, you need to be careful what words you use in your content.

My wife’s Natural Family News blog, often contains adsense ads that don’t really match what her readers would be interested in. That’s because her blog sometimes contains keywords that don’t match her niche.

Even if your blog is focused on one main topic (like our new winter olympics blog) you will still occasionaly get unrelated ads. For example, a couple of days ago, my wife wrote an inspirational post that included the words “*mber *lert” (replace the * with an a). Well, needless to say she had many ads about m~ssing ch~ldren (replace the ~ with an i). Which is fine, but not what you would expect from a winter olympics blog.

Google did fix it, after I used section targeting. Section targeting allows you to tell Google’s Adsense code what is and is not important on a page. It may or may not be used to determine the Adsense ads that are displayed on the page, but I figure it couldn’t hurt. You can learn more about Adsense Targeting here.

You might wonder why I used ~ instead of the letters a and i, in my example. Well that is another way to prevent unwanted ads. But it isn’t ideal.

In my opinion, Google Adsense is the BEST affiliate advertising system around. I highly recommend you use it on your website if you are trying to make money online.

Best placement of Google Adsense

A lot of people have asked me the question,
“Where is the best place to put Google Adsense ads on my blog and/or website?”

Well Google has answered that question for you. Take a look at this page titled “Where should I place Google ads on my page?”

It gives you a “heat chart” that shows you the best places to put your ads. Hope this tip helps you make more money with your blog or website.

Make Money Online - What to Sell on ebay

There are more than one million people visit ebay every day. These people come to eBay not just visiting, they are looking for something and ready to buy when they found the items they are looking for. If you have something to sell online, eBay obviously is the best place for selling your stuff. You can sell almost anything you can imagine on eBay. Here are some tips and ideas that can help you start making money from eBay.

Sell High Demand Products
To find out what products hot in eBay, you can study eBay Hot Categories report at http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/hotitems.pdf which can help you decide what kinds of hot items you want to sell. After deciding what items to sell your next question is where to buy these items for reselling on eBay. You can buy your stocks from wholesalers, but you usually need to order in bulks. Thus it will cost you several hundreds to thousands dollar to buy the stocks at the beginning. One way to start your eBay business with minimum cost is deal with drop ship wholesalers. Drop ship wholesalers allow you to list their products for sale on eBay and other auction sites without paying upfront to stock products. You only pay to the drop ship wholesaler when an item is sold and the drop ship wholesaler will ship the item on your name to your customer. You don't store any inventory; package and ship merchandise.

Garage Sales and Flea Markets
You can find inexpensive items for reselling on eBay from garage sale and flea markets. Take some time to shop around for the items you wish to resell on eBay.

Sell Returned Items
Another way to get things to sell on eBay is buy returned items from stores and retailers. Usually the retailers will not resell returned items again so they have to do something with those returned goods. You can try to approach store managers and ask them whether they can sell the items to you at below cost.

Trade Shows
Trade shows are another way to find products for reselling on ebay. Lots of merchants gather in one place to look for resellers. You can find trade shows in a particular industry by contacting trade associations and industry publications.

Ways to Make Money Online

Make Money Online With A Free Blog
Blog or weblog is simply a website with continuous updates on a particular subject or topic and the latest post will stay on the top. For instance, If your blog is about motorcycle. You can post the latest news and announcements from motorcycle manufacturers, discuss about the latest models of motorcycles and the best components used for producing motorcycles. You can create a blog absolutely free by joing Blogger.com. Creating a blog with Blogger.com is easy as you don't need any technical knowledge and you can have your blog published within an hours.

There are several ways you can make money with a blog:

Place revenue generating Ads on your blog
You can join Google AdSense program and start earning advertising revenue from your blog.

Sell Other People's Stuff
You can promote your affiliate programs by placing the affiliate links and banners on your blog and earn commission whenever someone clicks through an affiliate link or banner to your merchant's website made a purchase.

Sell Your Own Product
Blog can be used to promote and sell your own products too. You can write about your products' features and benefits on the blog.

Sell Products or Services Online
You can set up an online store to sell a wide variety of products. However, it will cost you few thousands dollars to start an e-store. One way to start an online business with minimum capital is deal with drop ship wholesalers. So how drop shipping works?

- A drop ship distributor is a wholesale company that will ship one product directly to your customer.
- You don't need to pay for an item unless it is sold.
- You don't store any inventory.
- You don't package and ship merchandise.
- Your customer pays the retail price for the product to you and you pay the cost of the product to the drop ship distributor. The difference is your profit.

Drop shipping system makes it affordable for anyone to start an online business due to the benefits it offers. EBay is the best place for you to start selling your products with drop shipping system. One strategy you can try is sell the similar items to the one that have attracted several bids in eBay. For instance, say you have opened an account with a cell phone drop ship dealer and ready to sell cell phone on eBay. You found that a Nokia 8810 cell phone have attracted 7 bids, so what you can try to do is list the similar item immediately with lowest price possible. Of course, there is no guarantee that you will make any money with this strategy. There are many more auction selling ideas you can find from the Internet which can help you make a steady income on eBay.

Be a Freelancer
There are many freelance job sites consist of a long list of freelance job contracts. These freelance sites usually offer the following jobs:

1) IT jobs (web-design, Jawa, PHP, script-installation, programming, graphic design and so on)
2) Writing & Editing Jobs
3) Administrative support (Data entry) & accounting services.

You may join several freelance sites for free and start bidding for the projects and contracts that are right for you. You can also make extra money writing articles and essays. There are places and websites where you can sell your articles and essays for a price anywhere between $5 to 25 per article. Furthermore, there are forums and blogs offer to pay anyone who post message and article to their websites.

Be an Affiliate
Affiliate makes money online by selling other people's stuff. An affiliate earns commission whenever someone sent by him/her to his/her merchant's website makes a purchase. Clickbank is one of the best places you can find an affiliate program to join because it is the largest e-book store and contains a ton of merchants looking for people to sell their e-books. The main task of affiliates is promote and advertise their merchants' websites (affiliate links). One method to promote affiliate program is advertise on Google. To advertise on Google you'll first need to open a Google AdWords account. You can start advertise on Google immediately after paying $5 account activation fee. Your cost of advertising is calculated in pay-per-click (PPC) basis. This means that Google will only charge you whenever someone clicks your text ad.

Paid Survey
Taking online paid survey at home is an easy way to make money online as you don't need any special skills and knowledge to complete paid survey job. In order to increase the money you can earn, you need to join as many market research and survey companies as possible. However you can't expect how much money you will make monthly because you have no idea when a paid survey invitation will send to your mail box. Thus it is not an ideal way to make a wage but a great way to make some extra income for paying your monthly bills.

How to Make Money Online with Private Label Rights (PLR)

Private label rights (PLR) are rights given a person to change or alter the content of an original product and the person can include his/her name as the author of the product after modification.

Products that come with private label rights include e-books, website templates, software, scripts, articles and other written, raw material.

Let's use e-book as an example. The Internet is flooded with e-book sellers. Some of them even give away the private label rights of their e-books to people who buy a copy of their e-books. If an author of an e-book would give you private label rights, you can edit the e-book in any way you see fit, add your name on the e-book and then use them in anyway that you think it will make money for you.

The advantages of gaining private label rights are they make starting an online business easier and faster. All you need to do is find the right material to work with, modify the text with your creativity, put in your name and you have an instant product ready to sell online. Futhermore, you get the glory of the byline since you can put your name on the PLR material because the product is yours to claim now.

Now, let's see how we can profit from PLR products:

1. If the license allows you to resell the PLR products as they are, you could start selling it right away and keep 100% of the profit.

2. If you buy PLR articles, you could change the articles into unique articles then use them to build niche content sites to make money with AdSense or other PPC and affiliate programs.

3. PLR articles can also be compiled into a series of tutorials and send them to your subscribers in your opt-in list. You can profit from your tutorials by using teach and sales technique.

4. You could use the PLR products as bonuses to your customers who purchase your own developed products or if you are marketing an affiliate product, you can offer the PLR products you have bought as incentive for anyone who would order the product through your affiliate links.

5. You could also use your PLR products as supplemental materials for your sales page. Do you have a highly informative piece in one of your PLR purchases? Clip the same and paste it on a box inside your sales page so that your readers can refer to it to complement whatever you will share on the main parts of your sales copy.

Here are some of the websites that offer PLR material:

http://www.sourcecodegoldmine.com
Selling PLR software products

http://www.viralmarketinggiveaway4.com
Free Internet marketing resources with PLR

http://www.plrpro.com
Selling PLR articles

These are just some of the things you could do with your PLR articles. The possibilities are quite endless, further establishing these PLR goodies as fantastic options for your marketing needs.

My Internet Marketing Review of Easy Profit Auctions

While I was in Florida, I got an offer from Alex Jeffreys to take a look at Easy Profit Auctions (aff). Now, let me start this off by saying that I am not really interested in getting involved in selling products on ebay. However, after taking a look at Alex’s product, I am having serious second thoughts about that.

So here’s the deal…

Through tons of trial and error, Alex discovered a system of making money through ebay by building email lists, selling products, and selling products on the back-end to his list. His system is rather interesting and definitely worth looking at, especially if you are interested in selling ebooks and/or other products.

He also has some great audios, videos, and a private membership forum. There was one tip in his audio interview with Jason James that I would have paid at least 100 dollars for. It was something I have been wondering about for a long while.

Of all the products I have reviewed in recent times, Easy Profit Auctions hand’s down gives you the most bang for your buck. Based on other products I have bought and/or reviewed I would say that Alex should be charging around 1000 dollars for a lifetime membership, but he is only charging a one time fee of $97 dollars for a lifetime membership.

My guess is that Alex will change over to a monthly membership fee soon, because his membership site is WAY underpriced.

Normally, at this stage in my review I would tell you what I didn’t like about the product, but quite frankly I am having a hard time doing that. I guess Alex could have made more audios, and videos for the site, but since he is working on doing just that I can’t really think of a downside to Easy Profit Auctions.

Anyway, I highly recommend checking out Alex’s Easy Profit Auctions site by clicking here. I am glad I did.

StomperNet Review - What Did I Think Of The Trial Membership?

I went into the StomperNet trial knowing that I already had specific plans to grow my online business. I was hoping that whatever StomperNet offered to the trial members would help me achieve MY plan faster.

StomperNet wasn’t exactly what I expected…

Unfortunately, the StomperNet members didn’t have access to ALL of the Stomper material. The advanced materials (which I needed) were made available with limited access. That made it pretty hard for me to determine if I would get anything out of their full blown membership.

That said, they did let trial members test drive a system they call SIMPLE (Specific Instructional Methodology for People to Learn Ebusiness). SIMPLE is designed to help begginners start a web business in a matter of thirty days. As they say on the stomper blog:

StomperSIMPLE is a ground-breaking system to take you from NO idea
to a NEW Internet business in thirty days. All of the StomperNet
faculty are going to pull out EVERY stop to get you up and running.

After looking through most of the SIMPLE materials, I am fairly confident that people who follow every step of the program will succeed at making some good money. One of my Stompernet trial team members, Andrea Yager, is still testing out the SIMPLE program. I am looking forward to seeing her results. However, I really hope her SIMPLE testing gets delayed by making it into the final 12 of the Next Internet Millionare. That would be cool!

The coolest part of the program was splitting up into teams and networking/working with your fellow team members. Even though I am no longer part of Stomper, I really hope to keep in touch with my former team members. I could really see each of us benefiting from each other’s areas of expertise.

I think StomperNet is best suited for beginners who have some prior experience in the online world. I think that people who have an intermediate level of experience might benefit from it as well. However, as a trial member it was really hard to tell how beneficial the advanced materials were going to be.

I think it is very difficult to make a site that appeals to beginner, intermediate, and advanced visitors in ANY market. Maybe even more so in the Internet marketing world.

Before leaving they did give us two options for joining. One was to pay a smaller monthly fee ($97/month) which gave us access to the SIMPLE materials and the SIMPLE forum. The other option was to go with the full membership. For me personally, the SIMPLE program was not something that I really needed. On the other hand, the advanced videos and teachings might prove useful to me.

My suggestion to the Stomper ownership is to split StomperNet into 3 levels. Each level with it’s own price of admission. Each level offering various benefits to it’s membership. The highest price would be for the beginners, who should get full access to the program. That way they can grow at their own pace. Once they feel like they only need the advanced material they can switch to the advanced mode for a reduced price. The advanced mode woudl be the second option. Advanced users might only have access to the advanced videos, but not to the rest of the site (forums, tools, etc). The third option would be gaining access to the SIMPLE program at a reduced price. I am sure there are other ways that StomperNet could split it’s program up that might work even better.

All in all, I think that StomperNet is a solid program for learning how to make money online. Based on the way that the staff quickly responded to the needs of the trial members, my guess is that it will improve quite a bit every year.

Auction Ads Doesn't Work on "Make Money Online"

Niche I have tested Auctionads for 19 days in this blog. The result is quite disappointing. I Generated more than 10,000 impression/views in this blog with 185 ad clicks and got 3 new referrals. But only made 68 cent sales commission. 68 cent earning for over 10,000 impression and 185 ad clicks, what a poor result.

I noticed that the most of auction ads displayed on this blog are ebay ads offering 'how to' e-books teaching people to make money online. Well, no wonder the result is poor. This type of 'how to' e-books are very difficult to sell in ebay. There are plenty of ebay listings selling 'how to make money online' e-books on ebay but you hardly see a bid on these listings even though the starting bid is less than a dollar. So the 185 visitors I sent from my blog to ebay are viewing ebay auctions that offer 'make money online' ebooks for sell and 99% of them don't buy.

Besides that, I think Auctionads isn't working to niches related Internet marketing and home business also because people seldom buy products in these niches in ebay too.

However, Since auction ads are all about ebay listings that offer different types of products for sell with a picture of each product. So I guest Auctionads may be a good money maker for websites and blogs that talk about retail good such as electronic products, computers, cell phones, cameras, jewelry, video games and many more.

8 Tips to Make Your Website Profitable

1. Your website's template and design should relevant to your site’ title and content. You wouldn't want to use a dog graphic header on an e-commerce website that sells cell phones.

2. Whenever you have added new articles and content to your site let your visitors know immediately. You can do this by alerting your visitors using email. This will increase the numbers of people revisiting your web site.

3. Let your visitors know about your email address or even telephone number on your website. This offers a way to visitors to contact you to ask for more information and assistant which will enable you to build good relationship with your visitors. And those who are in the same niches may contact you requesting for potential joint venture for making more money online.

4. Provide an option to your visitors to view your website offline. You can offer it by autoresponder or printer friendly version.

5. Make sure your web content is original and targeted to your audience to avoid being seen as spamming by search engines. Search engines are good sources of high quality targeted traffic to your website in long term. So you don’t want to be blacklisted by them. You don’t need to make your content 100% original, 60% original or higher is safe enough.

6. Give your visitors a good reason to come back to your site. You may try to give incentives to encourage them revisiting your site like providing free games, adding entertaining videos frequently, allowing free downloads such as ebooks and software that are useful to your visitors.

7. Customize you website in logical and profitable sequence. You don't want people to see your freebies before they learn about what products you are offering. Identify what actions you want people to take when they are visiting your website that will make you profitable and then organize your site accordingly to entice people to take that action. If you main purpose is to earn money with cost-per-click ads programs such as AdSense, YPN, etc; you’ll want your visitors to click on your CPC ads to earn money. So you’ll need to place your CPC ads in the areas that will be easily seen by people when they first landed on your home page.

8. If you’re selling products or services or offering something free to use on your website. Don’t forget to add a FAQs section on your website that will answer your visitors and users questions immediately. This will simply make your visitors more happier visiting your site or using your free service as they are getting immediate assistance reading your FAQs.

Cost-Per-Click (CPC) Advertising Programs that can be Used along with AdSense

Google AdSense is probably the most effective money making program in helping bloggers and webmasters to generate online income. But Google's AdSense program policies are pretty strict. They disallow AdSense publishers to use other similar contextual advertising services together with AdSense in same web pages. However, not all contextual advertising programs are disallowed by AdSense actually. There are several CPC contextual ads programs compatible with AdSense. Here are two of them:

Kontera
Kontera can be a great way to increase the money you can make from your site and blog. Kontera is a little different with AdSense. Their ContentLink In-Text Advertising system will underline the relevant keywords of the content in your web pages. When a visitor points the mouse to a underlined keyword, an ad will show up. If the visitor click on the underlined keyword, you'll earn money. Below is a screenshot of Kontera content link


Kontera works with publishers from most of the countries in the world. But they also have a set of policies to meet to become their publishers.

Chitika eMiniMalls
Chitika eminimalls offers a selection of unique cpc ad formats that are targeted to your website or blog content. Chitika can potentially increase your web revenue if you know how to optimize their ads on your blog and website.

To run Chitika together with AdSense, you must set your Chitika ads to non-contextual. They also provide a number of options to publishers to customize their Chitika ads. You'll need to spend some time to test on different Chitika ads formats to find out which work best.

Pitfalls You Need to Know and Avoid when Making Money in Affiliate Marketing

Well, You have been thinking to make money on the net. You found a new online money making venture which is affiliate marketing. You are excited about affiliate marketing, learned it diligently and then worked long hours to make your new venture succeeds. Many of the marketing techniques you applied have helped you make a number of sales. The end of the month has arrived and you can't wait to receive your first payment. When you check your affiliate account and found that the amount you will be receiving isn't as expected, you are slightly disappointed. You then check your sale history, there were several items sold returned and your affiliate commission have to be deducted for the returns.

This is disappointing but it does happen. Generally, companies don't pay commission for returned items. You need to know about this. Affiliates will not be paid a commission on a returned good but; some dishonest affiliate marketing companies can use this to scam some of your profit. You should read their returned policies and understand clearly how it will effect your affiliate commission.

When a customer send an item back, a return occurs. Charge back also can occur when the customers dispute on an amount paid for a purchase. You should look closely on those items that are being charge back or returned. If you find that the purchases charged back are always very high ticket orders then they could be giving you false information. They are doing this to keep your commission down and keep some for themselves. Keep a close watch on returns especially if you think it is occurring often.

Chargebacks can also be an signal of another more serious problems. If many of the chargebacks are occuring during the money back guarantee or initial trial period, then this is could be an indication that the product or service you are marketing isn't up to customer satisfaction. The product can be misleading or just low quality. It will affect your affiliate earning and your future as an affiliate marketer. If this occurring too often, you'll need to look for an alternative of the affiliate program to promote.

You also should be aware of which products are actually earning commission for you. Make sure you understand which products you will be earning money from to avoid disappointment later. There are companies offer a selection of products to place on your website or blog, but only several products are profitable. Before agreeing to anything like this read carefully the terms and conditions.

Finally, you also need to ensure that the products that are sold have not other conditions attached. Certain companies will only pay commission if the customers fill out the payment details instantly. If they select a product and continue to shop, you may not earn commission on the product. You can also loose commission if the customer clicks on any other links before completing the order. If a customer order 10 products you are marketing, but then clicks on other link, you'll lose the opportunity to earn a large amount of commission.