subject: My Affiliate Marketing Story [print this page] My Affiliate Marketing Story My Affiliate Marketing Story
Hi I'm Ellis Fearn, I'm 26 years old and currently working full time within the construction industry. The recession hit the construction industry hard and so work was decreasing causing me to start worrying about my job. I needed to figure out how I could get an extra income whilst I still had my job and set up a back-up plan in case I became unemployed.
I first heard about affiliate marketing through my brother, he'd been working with people who were becoming quite successful in affiliate marketing. As my brother told me more and more about what they do, it sounded quite interesting. I looked into different affiliate programs and they all looked too good to be true and so I just abandoned the idea. After a few weeks I decided to look into it again and checked out a program that I knew someone was using. This program was free to join and so I had nothing to lose. Once I had signed up, I was able to access the online workshop and forums. The workshop was really helpful, it gives the member step by step guidance on first how to set up a website, get it online and then lots and lots of different techniques to get traffic to your site. The program even offers free templates for your website if you are a complete beginner.
I got my first web site finished and got it up and running online. The next step was to try and get traffic to my site. On most affiliate programs, they claim you can set up a site and start earning money within the first few hours. I fail to believe this is the case if you are a complete beginner. I began to follow the guides in the workshop and began working on it for about 4 hours a night. Everything I was doing didn't really seem to be doing much in respect of more traffic coming to my site. However I kept at it and thought I'd give it a chance. I kept working on it each night and everything seemed to be long winded. However after a couple of weeks I started to see a slight increase in traffic and then my first sale. I was so pleased when my first sale popped up. I began asking for tips and advice in the forums and asking questions about things I didn't understand. I was learning all the time and began to put this new knowledge to use. Again I began to see an increase in traffic and the traffic was more becoming consistent. As the traffic became more consistent, the sales increased. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't rolling in money but a sale is a sale and $20 here and there cannot be sneezed at. The sales began to encourage me to work more on this and so I kept working on creating backlinks to my existing site and creating new sites.
Before I started affiliate marketing I had begun to save up to go travelling and so any money I earned from the affiliate program would be a bonus. I'd just started to get a steady stream of traffic visiting my sites each day when the time to start my travels was here. I was going travelling with the hope I didn't need to work and so joining this affiliate program was part of that plan. To my surprise whilst I was visiting some spectacular places and chilling out on some amazing beaches, I was making sales online. All of this helped with extra spending money, especially when it turned out to be more expensive than I had predicted. All the work of spending each night on my sites was beginning to pay off and I was starting to see results for my efforts. The good thing about it being all online was that I was able to keep an eye on my sites while I was away and I was able to do a little work on them in my spare time if needed. I was away travelling for 5 months and had an amazing time.
My travelling had ended and I was back to reality. Luckily I was offered my old full time job back, which I accepted as the money I was earning from affiliate marketing was nowhere near enough to live off. I was excited to get stuck into my web sites again and trying to get more and more traffic and sales, it gets quite addictive. I've been back from travelling for nearly 3 months now and I'm getting a steady stream of cash come through each week. I don't have to do as much work as I did before I went away as I now have the initial things in place. All I need to do now is keep up to date and on top of my sites. However if I create a new site, more work has to go into that to get it up and running to a decent standard.
A lot of affiliate programs say you can earn lots of money for a few hours work a week. In some ways this is true but in others it is not. You can choose to do very little work and make the odd sale but you will earn nowhere near what you were expecting. However if you choose to put the hard work in at the beginning, it may not seem worth it at first but you will eventually see results like I did. Once the results start coming through, you can begin to relax a little and start making the big money with little effort as you have put everything in place to run itself. My advice to anyone wanting to get into affiliate marketing is to be prepared to put some effort into it and stick at it even if you don't think you are making much progress. Eventually you will see traffic and sales increase. There are also plenty of people online who can give you advice on your sites and tell you what they feel may help you increase traffic and sales. Do not give up!!
