Since it’s been over 2.5 years of “normal life” with no affiliate marketing learning or activity, I decided to drop by some of my old “hangouts” aka blogs to find out what I’ve missed.  Turns out I haven’t missed anything except that a lot of my old hangouts are gone!   It seems that many of the “BANS groupies” are gone, most likely having given up on Ebay Partner Networking of Affiliate Marketing entirely.

Were You Sucked Into The “Get Rick Quick” Dream?

The idea of quick riches seems to be just that; A DREAM.  Being successful in building a long-term affiliate income takes hard work and building quality websites.  It requires many hours of time spent learning, writing and building, with possibly little or no payback for a few months or more.  When I look back at the way in which I got started in affiliate marketing, I bought the Build a Niche Store script and went about building over 20 websites.  The great news is that within 6 months I was making about $700 per month, but when I look back on the quality of sites that I was building, I’m embarrassed!

Although my old sites had lots of content, they weren’t great.  I’m not exactly the best artist nor do I have an eye for design.  I’m just not wired that way.  I did the best I could without paying anyone, but what I got were some pretty mediocre websites.  In fact, a few of my old websites are still in existence today (with new owners.)  I showed my business parter one of these sites just yesterday, and he exclaimed “You built that…(long pause)”  He’s an exceptional graphic designer and he was less than impressed with what I had built.  But it did make some money.  I suspect that many of you can identify with this scenario.

This time around is different.  We are partnering together to build visually appealing websites in tight niches.  I’m doing the SEO and marketing and my business partner is going to help with the visual elements of building a great looking site.  It’s a win-win partnership.

We have a few ideas kicking around, but I don’t exactly want to give the ideas away.  What I will say is this; We are not sticking to “niche store” sites specifically.  We have found a few niches on sites that we believe, based on our research, should get lots of traffic.  We will simply monetize them appropriately (not in tacky manner) and see what happens.  These will be quality websites though, not just crappy doorway pages.

From past experience in starting all over again, I would say this:  “Begin with the end in mind”

What do I mean by that?  Plan out your site design, your objectives and goals for the site, get inside the mind of your target market and be intentional in your actions.  Don’t just go around willy-nilly, just trying to see if something works.  Sure. there will be some trial and error as you are learning, but at the same time, there’s plenty of free information out there that can give you a great headstart.