As you all know, I’m always looking for ways to make more money and I know you are too – that’s why you are reading this! So anyway, I’ve been playing around with affiliate marketing for a while now but have not had much success. I’ve been able to get a sale here or a sale there but usually for just a few bucks. So last week I decided I wanted to give it a harder shot and started doing some reading on Ian Fernando’s site, Justin Dupree’s site, Zac Johnson’s site, and many others. I’ve basically been looking for any tips, guides, or recommendations to get me started into the crazy world of affiliate marketing and PPC (pay-per-click) marketing. Well, after launching a couple campaigns recently, I had some luck last week!

I made $60.

Yes, you read that right, $60. Now, its not exactly anything to jump and scream about when guys like Jonathan Volk are earning thousands of dollars a day or even people making a few hundred a week. However, it is fun to see the small amount of work that I put into it start to pay off somehow. So, I wanted to go through a few things that I did, the process I went through, and hopefully it will give you some ideas and tips on starting up some of your own campaigns to earn that extra money.

First, you’re going to need to be apart of an affiliate network like Market Leverage. The folks at Market Leverage are great and I highly recommend going with them as they have a good variety of offers in a number of industries/niches. So, start out by signing up with them and then get familiar with the dashboard and looking through the offers. Another great option is Commission Junction which is a very popular network with tons of online stores, sites, and programs.

Next, you’ll need to decide what kind of offers you want to run. Now, you have a bunch of choices. If you have a large email list built up, you may want to run email specific offers or if you know where you can get a large amount of traffic from, email or zip code submit offers may convert better for you. But if you don’t have an email list of thousands of people or large amounts of traffic you could direct to a landing page, there is always the option for advertising your campaign through Facebook, MSN AdCenter and Google AdWords.  These are the three traffic sources I have been using lately, but there are tons of others – pretty much any search engine has an advertising networking you can join.  If you want to just push out some affiliate links and test a bunch of different offers, offers that allow for search traffic will be what you want to go with.

Once you’ve decided on the type of offer you want to run, you have to decide on the actual offers to promote. This is where it gets tricky. Obviously a network is going to have a lot of offers you could run including niches like weight loss, mobile/ring tones, home business ops, dating, and more – so narrowing down what you want to promote is important. However, you easily could just start picking random offers and trying them out. It just depends on what you want to do!

–

In part two of this short series on affiliate marketing, I’ll write more about actually setting up ads with AdWords or AdCenter and testing different things to see what works. Look for that coming shortly.

So anyway, I’ve been signed up with Market Leverage for a while now and haven’t done much with them until now. I’ve started talking more with my affiliate manager (AM) and getting some more information to read up on and find out good approaches to make money.

While I was in Orlando, FL I had the chance to do more networking then I have at home. Market Leverage is located outside of Orlando and one day while I was there, my AM called me up and I told her I was in Orlando and to my surprise she told me that that is where ML is headquartered. So, that of course led to being invited to meet in person and check out the office. So, one Thursday I went over (about 10 minutes from where I was working) for lunch and to meet some of the crew.

Let me tell you, they’ve got a pretty sweet set up. Very nice and open offices, a non-traditional “cubiclesque” set up, great people, and on top of that, a catered lunch EVERY DAY! I know, I didn’t believe it either. And I’m not talking about just pizza…a real cooked meal.

Most of the crew at ML is young (mid 20′s to early 30′s in age) and as you would expect that leads to a HUGE range of topics during the daily lunch in the conference room. As people started to sit down to eat, I very quickly got a warning of the vulgarity and randomness to come, but I was expecting nothing less anyway.

The group at Market Leverage is incredibly nice and extremely willing to help those new to affiliate marketing and newbies like myself start earning some money through their offers. So if you are not already signed up with them, I strongly recommend you do so. It’s worth it! You’ll get an AM to keep in touch with, bounce ideas off of, and get tips on which campaigns are converting well.

Plus, maybe you can score yourself an “I’m Blogging This” t-shirt like I’m sporting in the above picture.

Affiliate Theme is an innovative new WordPress theme, but with a twist. Affiliate Theme was built exclusively for affiliate marketers and make money online bloggers who build landing pages and review sites for niche products and offers. Some of the top bloggers and Internet marketers are already using it. I  hear those guys are using Affiliate Theme to pull in hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.

Basically, the theme gives you the chance to quickly set up landing pages and niche sites based around different affiliate offers from Market Leverage or any other affiliate marketing company you belong to.

Here are some of the customization offers:

• With a single click you can change the entire layout from 1-column, 2-column, 3-column, 4-column, left-column sidebar or right-column sidebar. That effectively means you can test six different website layouts without needing multiple themes.
• You can control the background colors or images, font typography, homepage title and header graphics.
• You can easily insert tracking code without needing to hack your theme.
• Your blog’s navigation system can easily be changed, as well as the footer elements.
• There are settings for a featured offer on your homepage (like a highlight box) and also individual page offers.
• and a WHOLE lot more…

With the theme comes with 6 different templates and a few different customized headers that you can use. Of course you can customize any portion of it to fit your needs. Check the Affiliate Theme website for full details.

As with any other wordpress theme site, you can sign up for a single use package, a multi-use package, or an unlimited use package.

If you want to start making money through affiliate offers and niche wordpress sites based on different CPA offers, then Affiliate Theme is the way to go. Sign up and give it a shot!

With that being said, there is a pretty good offer in the sidebar for people who are looking to learn more about selling on eBay and want to grasp the opportunity to make some money from the online marketplace.

The offer gives you access to a GREAT ebook and CD titled “Auction Professor” as well as some other good resources. One of them is access to a wholesale supplier website which has thousands of different products for you to access at great wholesale prices. The offer does have a cost to it, of only $2.29. For this price, you get the eBook “Auctions Professor” on CD so you can take it with you anywhere.

Here is how you can also benefit from completing the offer
So, because this is an affiliate offer that I am running, if you were to sign up for the trial experiences and pay the $2.29 for the CD, I will make a little bit of money for the referral. HOWEVER, what I want to do is something a little different – I want to pass some of that earnings back to you, my readers. So if you sign up for the offer and complete it (and contact me to confirm it) I will send you $10 (a $7.71 profit for you) for just a couple minutes of your time. Not too bad right? Even if you were not interested in selling on eBay, this is a quick chance to bump up your PayPal account with a few extra bucks. However, if you are looking to gain some tracking by using eBay to make money online, then this is a win-win situation for you.

Have questions? Be sure to ask! A final important thing to remember – if you do not want to continue using the different websites that you gain access to, then you will need to cancel your subscriptions or you will be charged.

If you are interested in signing up for Market Leverage, I’d love for you to sign up through my affiliate link but of course it’s not required. If you want to participate in the contests being run by Tyler and Ian, you will need to register for Market Leverage through their referral – a sneaky way for them to make extra money as you compete to make as much money as you can in a time period.

However, if you do want a shot at a Nike duffel bag full of Market Leverage stuff, then check out the contest that John Chow is running.

All you need to do is blog about the contest and send a trackback – its that easy. Then, you just hope that you get picked as a winner of one of the great prizes. See any of the many contests happening around the net to see what is being given away!

Contests are also happening at Balkhis and CashTactics.

• ReviewMe: $15.00
• AdSense: $15.69
• Private Ads/Posts: $20.00
• Text Link Ads: $5.51
• CashCrate: $22.79

Total: $78.99

ReviewMe – ReviewMe is a great way to make some extra money from your blog by writing sponsored posts. Even though I did not have any high paying offers from ReviewMe to be posted on Dorm Room Biz, I utilized a couple of the different campaigns that came across my RSS feed reader. Had I jumped on more of them and spent time to write more posts on different websites and topics, this could have amounted to at least $50 for the month. However, when I consider different reviews to take on through ReviewMe’s campaigns, I try to keep the content relevant to Dorm Room Biz and the topics that you all are interested in reading about. This helps the paid posts to not be as obvious and to not be obtrusive to you all.

Google AdSense: Although it is not a major earner for me, it does bring in a few bucks here and there. I am going to be working on better optimizing the site to utilize AdSense in a couple different ways which will hopefully result in a higher CTR and a higher payout to me!

Private Ads/Private Posts: This is usually the category that is the biggest earner just because different businesses and bloggers are more interested in working directly with another blogger as opposed to working through a third party service. It also allows the blogger writing a sponsored post or putting up a private ad to make a higher amount rather than totally relying on a service like Text Link Ads. With the installation of OIOPublisher, I hope that I will be able to increase my private ad sales by offering other areas throughout the site that you can advertise in. For the current rates, please email me, but you can get an idea of where they are at right now by visiting the Advertising page. If you are not using OIOPublisher to manage your private ad sales, I definitely suggest you check it out!

Text Link Ads – I didn’t even realize that I had sold any for the month! I got my TLA integrated with my regular links sections and for some reason didn’t receive notification that I had sold one and never noticed it. Anyway, its nothing to quit a job over or even get paid for the month, but will eventually get paid out as more sell. I already had $25 worth of TLAs sell on another site of mine, so the end of June I should receive a combined payment.

CashCrate – I know I have said it before, but I really do love the way CashCrate works and the great system they have set up. CashCrate is a constant money maker for me and I can always rely on it to generate some extra money. If you haven’t already, take a look at the different reviews that I have done on CashCrate here and here and then sign up for the program so that you too can start making money! Once you get your account established and you make your money from completing surveys, get referrals signed up underneath of you so that your earning power continues to grow.

Besides these money makers, I have also joined up with Market Leverage to bring my readers different offers that will hopefully benefit you all, so look at for these different offers around the site. If you are looking to get into affiliate marketing and more serious advertising revenues, I strongly suggest you take a look at ML and sign up. Bloggers such as Zac Johnson, Ian Fernando, John Chow, and Shoemoney have had great success with them and they are a great group of people willing to help you out!

There are just so many ways out there to make money online from blogging that it is hard to test them all out. I am interested in any experiences that you all, my readers, have had from working with any of the companies that I have mentioned above or any others. Now that I am getting into putting more advertising on the Dorm Room Biz site, I am contemplating ANOTHER redesign (I know, I know – I just had it redesigned not too long ago). But, I would like to change up the side bar some and make it into a 2 column sidebar to utilize the space better as well as make for less scrolling just to see the sidebar items. We shall see!

I also have some other cool ideas planned for Dorm Room Biz over the next couple months, so be on the look out for some new releases of different items in the near future!

Here’s to blogging success!
Chris