Hi guys,

It’s fridaaaay! So as I won’t blog this weekend (theorically, I have scheduled posts ) and as I won’t give you all my affiliate marketing information at once, I’m going to take a breath today respecting AM and I’m going to share with you my incomes report of the first month of 2009:

• Private Sales: $129.5
• TLA: $21.16
• Affiliate Commissions: $215.5

Total: $366.16

The other months I was earning about $400, so you could appreciate a little drop during the last month but algo note I didn’t make any Web Design jobs, which ussually gives me at least $100.

So what do you think about them? With all this posts about affiliate marketing I’m very inspired and working in a couple of affiliate campaigns which will increase my earnings by hundred dollars – or at least I hope so.

The last week, Pepperjam Network launched a beta version of Pepperjam Store Builder™, which is available exclusively through Pepperjam Network for FREE to all advertisers and affiliates.

Pepperjam Store Builder™ allows you to quickly and easily manipulate Pepperjam Network product feeds in real-time to build product storefronts on your Web site.  You can use Pepperjam Store Builder™ to easily link to specific products, create dedicated product feed Web sites, supplement your existing content or blog, add additional value to your coupon or incentive site, or for just about anything else your imagination will allow.

With Pepperjam Store Builder™ you have access to millions of products from hundreds of Pepperjam Network advertisers. You can automatically create storefronts by selecting any combination of merchants, categories, or keywords.  The more merchants and / or categories you select the more products that will be available to your Web site visitors. However, you may also choose to use the Pepperjam Store Builder™ search filter to refine your search to a specific kind or type of product.  For instance, you may select CostumeKingdom.com as your merchant, but only want to display “pumpkin” costumes.  No problem!  Simply use the search filter and type in “pumpkin” to refine the feed to show only the products you want.

Now, let’s check some screenshots to let you know how it works:

As you can see, it’s easy like a 1-2-3! Once you completed 4 easy steps you will get the html code of your store! And you know what’s the best of it? It is WordPress Optimized!

As you can see, you can customize everything you want: Products, links and colors! So it is perfect to merge it with your website or blog without altering neither the look nor the niche of your website.

So if you want to try and start making money with Pepperjam Stores, feel free to do it by signing up here. Stay tuned because the next week I will be dealing with this kind of stores!.

PS: Unfortunately I don’t have screenshots for you, thing which I will cover in the next week!

Many times, when you think about making money online, the phrase Affiliate Marketing crosses your mind, may be because we associate the word marketing with money. Is not a secret that you can make hundreds, even thousands of dollars a month with affiliate marketing but that is not too easy as many people say on Internet.

Myth #1 – It’s easy to make money

So if I’m telling you that is not too easy, you may be wondered why. Many people lie to take advantage of, that’s a fact! Let’s be honest, when someone says that it is easy to make money with X affiliate network and it shows you checks of thousands of dollars, is because it wants you to register on that network under its name, this way it could get commissions for what you make.

Of course, it is easy to make money when you have an army of referrals behind you.

Myth #2 – Low capital required

Remember that everything has a cost, if you want to make thousands of dollars you will have to spend thousand of dollars. Is fairly impossible to make thousands by investing lower amounts, remember that affiliate marketing is mainly based on traffic, so if you want to drive many people to your website you need to invest on PPC campaigns such as Google Adwords.

In addition of that, if you are promoting a campaign with 3% of conversion rate it means that 3 of each 100 visitors will (or could) buy the product. Of course that a good web design helps but that’s basically what it means.

You need to make your plans to compensate the invested (and wasted) capital for driving the other 97 persons to your website.

Myth #3 – You will get money fast

This is the most false myth ever. Before you start making real money and not a few bucks, you will need to try many different things in order to optimize your promotion. You will need to be changing the theme of your landing page, changing its keywords, its title and redistributing the things on your website. After then, you will find what is converting for you! So how much you will need to wait until the first check? That’s up to you, it depends of your work.

Myth #4 – Work just 2 hours a day

Huh? another false myth. Affiliate marketing is mostly carried out by entrepreneurs, people who like to experiment and look for new ways to meet their goals. It is completely false to say that working 2 hours per day you could get thousands of dollars. Well, may be after many years when you have all your campaigns already optimized, you could stop working if you want, but that’s not true. Internet changes and people too, so you need to be constantly changing your promotion and keywords too!

Setting up a website with marketing purposes could take you many time, you will fall asleep after midnight trying to do your best, checking you traffic statistics and optimizing what you have done.

My Personal Recommendations

In order to make your affiliate’s life easier and avoid to be consumed by it, I suggest you to put in practice the following things:

• Make backup plans: Is something is not working for me, I try to put in practice another concept in order to improve the performance of my work. Always is good to have backup plans, when something is going wrong that kind of special plans could safe you! And I’m not telling you this just for affiliate marketing, you should apply this for everything in your life.
• Set goals: May be the most important thing. If you don’t know your goals you will be doing things without sense.
• Set a schedule: Take a calendar and fix your hours of work, this way you could take off the shackles and do another activities beside working on your promotions.
• Be patient: Remember that money won’t flow through your account immediately, and it will take days, weeks or may be months to see real money in your accounts.

In my eBook The Affiliate’s Start Guide I talk about all the basics things to create a website and make money with it, so I invite you to sign up for my newsletter and get your copy for free now!

It is almost finished! Yes, this series that talks about building an online business using blogs is almost done. This is the last article which talks about something really important and something skipped in the previews lessons, making money! If you are building “a business” you should want to see money flowing through it, so let’s talk about some useful ways to earn profits from your blog.

5. Make Money

First of all, remember when I said in the preview lessons that you can promote your own products or services on the blog, well it’s time to do it! You can build banners in order to let your visitors know about what can they find in your blog.

Depending of your product or service, you can offer some basic features for free and then charge for some “premium features” which the users can get a better experience of your service. This is usually a good way to get money, once the users are familiarized with your product they will pay to get a complete version of it (if they need those features).

Besides by selling your product or service, you can also get money directly from your blog by using other services like the following ones:

• Google Adsense: This is may be the most common way to earn money on Internet. With Adsense you can display relevant ads on your website or blog and get paid for each click the people make on that links. The minimum payout is $100.
• Bidvertiser: This service is very similar than Adsense, you can display banners which you can personalize to make them look similar than your blog’s theme. The advantage of using this program is its minimum payout of $10.
• SponsoredReviews: With this service you can earn money by writing reviews about services or products on your blog. This is a perfect way to make money just by writing an article of a product or service related with yours.
• Text-Link-Ads: This is an excellent way to make money passively. With TLA you can earn money by selling text links on your blog’s articles. It works completely automatized and you don’t need to contact anyone to sell links. You only need to install a plugin on your blog and when someone buy a link on your blog it will be displayed automatically.
• Market Leverage, NeverBlueAds and PepperJam: These three services are affiliate networks which you can find many products and services that you can promote on your blog. Excellent way to get checks with good amounts.

There are many other ways to make money with your blog, for example you can sell banners and keep 100% of your earnings with the awesome OIOPublisher plugin for wordpress. There should be many undiscovered ways to make money and it’s up to you to discover them.