So I decided to dive into SEO, learning everything I can from as many sources as possible. Since then I have developed several campaigns trying to tackle the SERP in google. Many without any luck, but I am getting better at it. My recent success is getting to position #3 for my latest campaign.There is not much traffic behind the targeted keyword, but it has resulted in a couple sales reaching just under $100 in commission.

The point of this thread is that SEO is much harder then you think. I though it would be something I can tackle really quickly, but the thing with SEO is that there is lots of waiting… waiting for pages to get indexed, waiting for backlinks to get discovered, waiting for Google to update, waiting for my rankings to climb. All this waiting for things to happen makes it really slow to test ideas and figure out what works and what doesn’t. Unlike PPC I can have test results within hour or a day at max. With SEO it seems I need about a week to see if any changes are going to take effect.

I am still determined to master this, but I have to admit at this point its harder than some people make it out to be. I have put about 3 months or so into it, created about 20 or 30 different campaigns and resulted in 3 current campaigns making money, but not much money, its under $1,000 per month in revenue. Only the recent most campaigns are making any money as well, because I just screwed up the first projects and then just left them for dead.

What makes SEO so hard? Ranking mostly. Every time I put something new up I end up between position 20 and 100, and if you have any experience with search results anything past the first page gets no action what so ever. The hard part is climbing the ranks in the search engines where people can see find you. The biggest problem is there are some many people willing to give advice on how to do SEO and how to get on the top of google, but I dont think those giving advice have any idea what they are talking about. Those who I have found that are on the top of the search results always keep their mouth shut and wont give you an ounce of advice.

Its a secret and a mystery on how to climb the ranks which nobody is willing to share. I guess they have plans on taking over the internet one keyword at a time. I guess thats my plan as well, but first got to figure out how to master climbing the ranks.

Is It Hard To Make An Affiliate Income?

Affiliate marketers lead you to believe that making affiliate sales are really easy and that anyone can do it in their sleep, but those who make those claims have something to sell. After all they couldn’t convince you to buy their information if they said affiliate marketing is hard, includes long hours and you may never make a single sale, but buy my information anyway just in case your one of the lucky ones… right?

The Cold Truth About Affiliate Incomes

If your not familiar with article writing, web pages, html, hosting, servers, marketing, back links, SEO and many other subjects needed to master affiliate marketing, you may have a few setbacks. I am able to go from 0 to over $500 in my first month simple because I understand all these concepts already and can dive right in. The only thing I was missing was the recipe to get free highly targeted traffic. Now im not an overnight millionaire and $500 may not seem like much, but many of those who will end up trying to make an affiliate income will never see a penny. I even read a story the other day of a guy who has been at it for over 9 months, who finally gave up because after almost a year of research and development, still never made a single sale.

Affiliate Income Resources

If you really want to get started in affiliate marketing I can recommend the following information. There is a really great primer on affiliate marketing provided by a guy named Ryan Moran. He spent over 4 months putting together a video series that is called TAG or The Affiliate God. His online course is 100% free and its a great introductory to affiliate marketing. He breaks it down to 4 weeks of learning but you can jump ahead if your a fast learner.

If you have a little money, then I would recommend signing up at Wealthy Affiliate. Its a great online community of which I am very active in. So is Ryan Moran the creator of TAG, and also Travis Sago who developed the step by step guide to The Bum Marketing Method which is currently putting about $500 a month extra in my pocket with no advertising or hosting expenses.

Lastly there is one more great resource I would like to share with you that can have you making money by the end of the week. This person has helped many people get their first affiliate sale and she is also very active in the wealthy affiliate forums. She has an active blog called Pot Pie Girl and she developed a method called One Week Marketing. I have never seen so many first time affiliates make a first sale before, but using this method I seem to see new posts thanking this method every day.

I signed up with an online marketing group called wealthy affiliate almost a year ago. I signed up because I was getting a flood of PPC questions over on digital point about PPC and wanted to try and solve the problem at the source. This post however is not about PPC, its actually about something called bum marketing.

What Is Bum Marketing

Simply put its marketing anything, a product, service or affiliate program, using methods that do not cost the marketer a Penny. I am mostly a PPC guy. I have used PPC for over 8 years, but with the recent slump in the economy makes it harder to pick up clients, and more clients want to spend less, or they are having a hard time closing sales. So I decided to to look into SEO.

I found out that i have a major resource of information that i have been paying for anyway. The information is from wealthy affiliate. This site is not dedicated to bum marketing, but more affiliate marketing as a whole, but as you can imagine many beginner Internet marketers do not have the funds to dump into PPC, or even web hosting for SEO reasons. So they came up with bum marketing.

Why Bum Marketing?

I have become slightly fascinated with this method of marketing lately. To learn and test the methods being thought I implemented some of my own bum marketing sites, and guess what… It really works. Not only for my PPC teaching, but I have also been making a small side income using these methods from CPA affiliate programs.

I am no SEO or bum marketing guru, but i have been learning a lot, and since I love to teach and educate others I think I will start adding bum marketing information onto this site. Not only that but I will start applying what i have been learning to this blog as well.

This blog will always be dedicated to my thoughts, education and things I enjoy sharing, I just hope to put in more posts to this blog and hopefully even increase its traffic…

Here is a screen shot of my earning report for all of 2007. I only made about $10k but I think that is not to bad considering I only spent a few hours per month on it. I have been gaining some really good traction and growth over the last several months and if I am able to maintain this pace of growth I should be right on target

I will be working on a product expansion to get more traffic for many more products and I am also working on some SEO sites to try and tackle the natural search results for my niche markets. Now that I am blogging online, I will also keep you updated on my amazon growth over the next year.