You’re new to affiliate marketing. You know people are making millions doing it, and you want to do it to. Problem is your budget is very limited – less than $100 a week. Now, it isn’t impossible to work on a budget this low, but you are limiting a lot of things – the amount of data you can generate being the most important.

Data is the most expensive, but most important resource in an affiliates arsenal. Without it, you’d probably make more money (or lose less) trying your luck at penny slots. So how can we maximize the data and minimize the spend to keep you in budget?

Research

I can’t emphasize the importance of research enough. This includes theoretical and practical research. You need to know the standards of how to do things, and how others are doing them. Join an affiliate marketing forum, such as Wickedfire, and read, read read. There are also some great blogs that drop good information. Check out Affbuzz. Know and understand what exactly Internet marketing is.

Then you need to gather data on whatever you choose to run. There are demographic toolsets and search targeting tools you can use freely all over the internet. Google Keyword Tool and Quantcast are great for these. Learn to use and love these tools and similar other tools.

Another form of research? Make friends. Many think they can work alone in this industry, and you can. But the moment you start making friends is the moment you start getting massive info bombshells dropped on you. You’ll make 10 times the amount you thought you could make with the info you can share with other people. It’s a game of give and get, as are most relationships, so keep that in mind!

Tracking

Tracking is your main way to collect data after you set up campaigns. BevoMedia offers a new solution that you might want to look into if you aren’t familiar with any tracking at all. Prosper202 is what I use now, and has been the industry standard for the past 3-4 years. Learn how to use them. Without tracking, you are shooting blindly.

Simplify

Without a somewhat decent budget of 100+ dollars a day, you need to simplify all your campaigns and traffic sources. In fact only use 1 on 1. Focus on building one campaign on one traffic source and don’t change things up just because they don’t work after 1 day. Learn how to split test with this campaign. Learn how to track keywords and referral sources with sub-ids. With a small budget, you are slowly accumulating data and experience.

And after all this, you still might not be making a ton of money, but you’ll know how to scale that one campaign once you gather all that data and do the research. If I can suggest you wait till you have at least 100 dollars to spend a day for a month, I would. I know some of you want to make money now, but you also need to be prepared to lose that money, and trust me when I say there will be times when you will lose that money.

I’m not being pessimistic; I am being realistic. Any who, if you guys have some budget knowledge to drop for my readers, leave them in the comments below!

Tired of affiliate marketing training and resources that are way too costly? Check out the forums for a change of pace!

When I get a review request from an affiliate network, I always take it very seriously. There are far too many networks being built everyday and, unfortunately, most of them only offer brokered offers with lower payouts and higher scrub rates compared to other more reliable networks. When I got a request to do one for T3Leads, I knew I wouldn’t have to deal with that. T3Leads is an extremely unique affiliate network in that you can choose from a large set of pre-built lead-gen offer pages and send traffic to those, or you can install their custom CMS and create your own forms and website to drive traffic to!

Above you can see some of the offer niches they cover. Like I said before, all of these are lead gen offers, which are considerably easier to convert than any cost-per-sale offers you may have tried before. My affiliate manager at T3Leads, Daniel Demirchyan, says some of their most popular niches are auto loans, loan modifications, and insurance, with a strong emphasis on payday loans (they have over 40 lendors!). As you can see from above, though, they have lots of other little niches that aren’t talked about a lot in other forums of blogs you read. That makes working with T3Leads a great chance to try something new and grab a part of a niche that isn’t flooded.

The above picture shows T3Lead’s simple to use lead-gen form generator. While the on-site forms are only available for a few niches, T3Leads includes its own CMS that you can download and install on your own site to basically create your own offer page. This allows you to collect leads on your own landing page domain names. It’s a great implementation for search marketers, as well as PPV marketers. Keeping all your prospective traffic on one domain really helps streamline everything and generate a sense of trust between the user and website. Below are shots from the easy-to-use CMS backend that you can use to create your own offer page.

All documents and instructions on how to use the T3Lead’s custom CMS are included in your affiliate dashboard. If you do have questions about the CMS, or anything else about your account or offer, though, T3Lead’s has a unique solution that I really think other affiliate networks should take now of. Rather than try and email an affiliate manager and hope you get an answer while your mail gets lost in the downpour of other emails your network gets, T3Leads implements a ticketing system. This ticketing system is supported with staff at your service 24 hours a day. This is great for someone like me who doesn’t always have the privilege of being able to IM someone when it is 1 pm my time, but 1 AM U.S. time.

All of the above is wrapped around the 3rd generation of their tracking platform. It is really slick and simple to navigate. It’s always nice to see an affiliate network go way outside of their way to improve their affiliates’ and merchants’ experience by using a custom built backend. It has all the tools and tracking plugins most affiliates are used to, as well as some that I wasn’t familiar with. Whether you’re new to affiliate marketing or a pure genius needing 100% control of everything from the site design to analytics and tracking, T3Leads has you covered.

Pro’s

• Ton’s of main-stream and deeper niche offers
• Dozens of fully customizable forms to insert on your own websites
• Custom backend and CMS for generating your own landing pages and offer sites with T3Lead’s forms
• Affiliate referral program that pays 3% of the gross revenue
• Bi-Weekly Payments (Weeklies if you generate more than $1000 a week)
• Ticketing system for 24/7 support

Con’s

• Requires some technical knowledge if you plan on using a custom offer page
• Some niches may be too competitive for newer affiliates.

Overall, T3Leads is a great and reliable network. If you’re looking for a network to supply you with an endless supply of email submit and dating offers, look at one of the other thousand copy-cat networks. However, if you are looking for a unique way to promote and generate leads, T3Lead’s just might have what you need.

Click here to register for T3Leads today!

It’s an affiliate network’s job to keep scammers and poor quality traffic runner’s out. If you put no effort into your affiliate application, no website, no email address other than Gmail or Hotmail, and your name isn’t floating around in the industry already, chances are, you’ll probably be flagged as an unknown and most likely denied access to the network.

So besides filling in an affiliate website, a real email address attached to one of your own domains, some other forms of contact (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc), and a little info about you and the traffic you run in the additional info field, what else can you do to better ensure you get approved?

Call the network. A simple call can get your approval expedited. Even if you run no traffic to any offers or landing pages currently, read up on current trends, do your research, and at least make it sound like you know what you are talking about. A good place to read up are affiliate blogs over on AffBuzz and forums like WickedFire and even Warrior Forum in some instances (despite what all you haters think, there are some good threads at WaFo that drop some bombs that very few people act upon).

If you still can’t get approved, try starting an affiliate blog. I can’t tell you how great a tool my blog is. I don’t sign up for affiliate networks anymore, they literally email me an account and give me tips. My blog gives me tons of other benefits on top of that, but we’ll save that for another post.

Join my forums for more in-depth discussion on getting approved at an affiliate network. Click here for more info.

Is dating a viable niche for new affiliate marketers to enter? Sure… any niche is! Is it easy? No. Is any niche easy? No. What’s the best niche to get into as a new affiliate? Any.

So why are so many new affiliate marketers heading into dating? I think it just has to do with it being so prominent, especially with the amount of dating ads any single male would run into on Facebook. There is also a ton of information out about it on forums, blogs, and I’ve even written about it once or twice on my blog.

The problem with dating is, though, that most of you affiliates think that dating is like this:

1. Get nice female booby pics
2. Target all men 18+
3. …
4. PROFIT!!!

This was the affiliate marketing industry about 2 – 3 years ago, right when I was jumping on-board. It worked for a while, and then, over time, I gradually saw my ROI drop from 100% all the way down to 10%. I’ve dropped out of the niche now, because I fell into other projects and niches that work for me. Am I saying dating won’t work for you? No. There are plenty of people making 4 – 5-figures a day with dating.

What are these people doing to make it work?

Besides split testing just about everything from ad images, ad copies, offers and landing pages, the real magic comes down to targeting. No longer can you target every single guy living in the US, UK, Canada, or the AU and expect to have low click costs, let alone a profitable campaign. The guys that know what they are doing target down to the 4-5 figure demographics, figure out how to get the best out of them, and scale it out to other similar demographics.

And you don’t have to limit yourself to the obvious. Try targeting through keywords like Sesame Street or something lame like that. Workplace targeting works, and targeting students from specific colleges has worked well for me in the past.

Don’t bitch and moan about how hard it would be to split test all these little demographics and think it would just be easier to target them all unless you like losing money. You’ll save yourself money, and might come up with some creative ideas that will fuel you into other great ideas. That’s what this new generation of affiliate marketers will need to do – get the hell outside the box and start thinking!

Still thinking inside the box too much? Leave your comments below, or join the forums so I can help you come up with some creative ideas!

I’m no expert on SEO, so don’t take my advice on it. Most SEO guru out there says build links that aren’t no-follow for maximum results and boost your SEO ranking. I still have a few SEO projects I work on here and there, lightly, that make me a couple hundred bucks a month for 15 minutes of work a day, so I dilly dally in the subject. However, I don’t pay attention to follow or no-follow links. I believe a link is a link, and follow and no-follow links both have their positive effect to SEO.

A do-follow link, of course, passes link juice. Link juice is the soul to what helps you increase rankings in Google. From my understanding, though, a lot of do-follow links are posted on websites that are spammed by others hoping for a little bit of link juice. Not all of them are bad, but I hope you understand what I’m saying here.

No-follow links, are generally implemented to control spam on high traffic websites. Spammers usually don’t give a damn about no-follow links, because all they want are rankings for their poorly written/Google translated content so they can make more Adcents (Adsense) money. Now if you are writing good content that helps a user, this is why even a no-follow link can help you.

The user enters your website from some no-follow high trafficked website link, likes your blog posts or articles, bookmarks it for you, 5 other people read it from that book mark and a couple others post about it on their blog. You just built a few more links, follow and no-follow which essentially brings you direct (probably very targeted traffic) and helps give you a bump in the SERPs.

Again, I’m no expert at SEO, and this is just my thought on the subject. I outsource all my basic link building, but I don’t really care where my outsourcers get links (except all those spam filled WordPress blogs) because almost all of them provide some trickle of traffic. That can eventually mean an extra sale, lead or subscription generated that makes me money.

Sometimes, we all have to dip our toes into some yucky substance we’d much rather avoid as Internet marketers. However, those niches that other marketers look at and say yuck at are the niches where there is still money to be made.

Remember the colon cleansing “flogs” (fake blogs). That was an untapped niche, although I’ve seen products for cleaning your colon on Clickbank well before the whole “flog” fiasco came along. Too damn bad I was way too grossed out by the pictures I saw on Google to ever put together a mini-site on it and start promoting well before everyone else did. I would probably be laughing at everyone else with their fake blogs while I stood on top of the pack with a much stronger, heavier page in Google.

There are people out there with some odd and disgusting problems. It is our job to find their solution and market it to them. This is key to true and big untapped profits. Having a clue that there is an odd product out there waiting to be marketed helps. You can do the research yourself, or if you have kickass affiliate managers, they’ll send you an email when a unique offer comes on the network.

That is just how I got one offer that has just been killing as far as ROI for me. I’m bidding huge click costs on it just to generate impressions, however, it still pays off with 150% ROI back in my pocket. And that ain’t chump change at all! With further optimization I could bump that up another 25 – 50%.

If you are looking for an odd niche, look at yourself first. What kind of odd problems do you have that you don’t have a solution to yet? Always biting your nails? Have webbed toes? In Thailand and can’t get a decent girlfriend? (Ha!) There has got to be an affiliate product or offer to solve all these problems, and if not, you can always create your own! Think outside the box to put money in your box.

It?s kind of freaky to think that your clients and worse off, possible clients know a lot more about you than you think they do. It pays to be careful about what you say on the Internet, as it can all be tracked back to you, especially if you use your name, website link, or anything else in reference to you in the open. That can add to what a possible client, and even current clients think about you. That in turn could affect whether or not they want you on their project.

Take possible discussions that you largely disagree with on forums with a spoon of sugar. State disagreements casually and don?t attack anyone. Hell! The person you disagree with could be a client of yours in disguise.

Posting things online that aren?t appropriate could get noticed by one of your freelancing clients. Sure, we all have things we like to do in our free time, but the Internet is a scarier world than you could imagine. Those naughty things you do late at night might have a user name or link attached with them that goes straight to your freelance writing website.

It?s not hard to see where you are getting links from, and outsiders can track them just as easily. If you are worried about past internet activities coming back to haunt your freelance writing goals, you might want to find some better ways to cover your internet tracks. Use obscure forum names, use a generic Yahoo, MSN, or Gmail account to send out emails, and avoid the use of signature links on forums that lead to your professional freelance writing website.

The best thing to do would be just avoid speaking out harshly against others, don?t use your link on non-coinciding forums, blogs and websites, and learn a little about Internet privacy.

I think I probably am one that needs to swallow a bit of my own advice, though. Heh heh.

Yesterday, I typed a really long, hopefully informational piece on not draining yourself physically while you undertake your career as a freelance writer for hire. Today, we get to review what you should do to keep your emotions on the low-down – that is to keep ourself away from burnout and emotional drainage.

Writing is a tedious, sometimes, repetitious task. While the glam of working from your home is seen as a superb opportunity for those stuck in their office, many freelance writers yearn for the office when it just gets to hard to handle. We are bound to our home writing space, often without the chatter of fellow coworkers in the background. It is lonely, and for me, loneliness has sent me on long drags of depression making it almost impossible to want to write at times.

A man’s best friend is their for you 24/7

A solution to the emptiness a freelance writer might feel can be dissolved when there is always our best friend to cheer us up. A pet relies on a human’s love and affection for it, and assuming you are a freelancer of some sort, you are probably an a human an animal can depend on. Animals provide the perfect pick-me-up, purring and playing with us, and demanding we feed it and spend time on it. Dogs are excellent, as they should be walked daily. This activity gets you away from your computer during your break time, which is an excellent source of exercise. Those with animals are proven to have a lower chance of being diagnosed with severe heart conditions, as well.

You like that, do you?

I’m attached to my computer, and that isn’t a great thing. It’s enough that I spend several hours a day on it doing my freelance writing work, but then I stare at my screen another 5 hours checking my social sites and reading countless other blogs. It’s time to get a hobby. A hobby can be anything, but it should stay away from your computer monitor. It gives you time to get away from the drain of your freelance writing, and lets you lose yourself in something you truly enjoy. You don’t need to be good at your hobby as it is just something that can help you build up a skill further. If you really enjoy writing that much though, do it, but start out with pen and paper first.

Maybe it’s time you sit this night out

You say you are getting tired of working on all your freelance writing projects at 3 A.M. in the morning? Stop complaining, because that isn’t my fault. Wake up earlier, and start that project up at 9 A.M. Then call up your friends, invite your neighbor, or pull your spouse along to the nearest bar or club. Loosening up at a party is an awesome way to give yourself a pat on the back for getting a long project finished with. Just make sure you don’t have any projects the next morning that are urgent. Even if this is the case, I find letting myself look like a fool on the dance floor extremely exhilarating. I don’t even need to drink to get my emotionally burnt out brain bright and perky for more freelance writing projects in the coming week. Making this your reward at the end of your project is a way to keep yourself pushing through your writing until you complete it.

I $#(sh^**ing hate that client!

Justin Dupre – Professional Freelance Writing with an Attitude – While I use that in reference to my writing being spicy, catchy, and a little more on the trendy side than other freelance writers’ manuscripts, I guess it can refer to me on top of that. I’ve got quite a temper, and have exploded when I can’t get things to run the way I’d like them to. When I have a client that asks for too much, or fails to pay me on our scheduled date, I get a little more than ticked off. Those clients should be glad I’m probably on the other side of the world and behind a computer monitor. Anyways, to get over this I let it out on people that experience the same problems as me – other professional freelance writers for hire.

We carry a common goal – to make money from freelance writing – and when our emotions kill us, it is always good to have someone to talk to. Other freelance writers will probably be very understanding of your situation as chances have it that they’ve probably had the same thing happen to them on more than one occasion. Talking about your emotions is completely okay, and should be supported. If you need to cry, let it out. You’ll feel better afterwards, unlike how horrible you would feel if you kicked that client in the shins (and I know you want to).

It’s 4 in the morning here, so I am cheating. Failing to listen to my own advice should be against the law. Luckily, I’m in the safe zone. It’s bedtime for bonzo, so I will see y’all tomorrow. Mmm kay?

Love and Respect,

Justin

Your freelancing website is all about you and the freelance writing services you provide. Most people visiting the site will probably looking for one of those services, but every once and a while there comes a visitor that isn?t generally interested in what you can write for them. They may have stumbled onto your page from a rogue link or misspelled keyword on the big ?G?. While there isn?t much you can do to gain them as a client if they don?t need any writing completed, you can always find other ways to monetize off of them.

So my question is, should you put in other sources of monetization on your freelance writing website or blog? I say, ?It?s never good to put all your eggs in one basket.?

Contextually speaking?

The general solution that most all blogs and websites put up is some type of contextual advertising. You can see (for now) that I have Google?s Adsense network advertising on my sidebar and header. These are great for those people that won?t turn out to be your clients. You make a little cash for each click you send to advertisers, and if you can build up heavy traffic, it can be very profitable. However, what you are doing is sending people to your competitors. These are contextual ads, meaning they are picking up keywords in your website?s body, and using them to place proper ads. If your website is about freelance writing, and how you want possible new clients to see your work, it might not be the best idea to send them to your competitors. I keep the ads up (for now) as I am fairly confident that my client base isn?t visiting my website, the ads are mostly advertising working opportunities for freelance writers, and it provides a little benefit to SEO work.

Becoming your audience

A much better option, I find, is to get in a marketer?s set of mind. It?s great being a marketing student because we have an edge on knowing how and what to sell (it is also one of the most sought after freelance writer attributes). Instead of pushing random ads, pick one or two and get people to buy into them. On a freelance writing website, you?d want to push materials excellent for freelance writers (and there are hundreds of ideas ? desks, chairs, website services, web hosting, computer accessories, notebook PCs, wireless routers, ebooks, and the list can go on forever. You can see my attempt at this type of marketing in the upper right hand where I have a banner ad for the ?Freelance like a Rockstar? eBook. I make a commission on each sale, which makes considerably more than a click on the Google Adsense plans. (BTW, the book is an excellent resource for any freelancer, new or well-worn into our game. It was worth the 30 dollars).

Selling your <body>

Another option a freelance writer can choose to employ is to sell ad space. For a freelance writer, this might be a little trickier because I guarantee you would get a ton of buyers wanting to push their own writing services. I would say no to them, but say a freelance designer contacted you. That might be something you are willing to put on your freelance writing blog or website, as it won?t intrude on possible clients being distracted by looking into other writers. It might be just what they need as the word freelance is a very broad term, and there is virtually a freelancer for every type of job.

I do think it is smart to put several sources of monetization on your freelance writing blog or website, but you need to think smart in order to make it work. Your job is to market your own services as a writer, not let other writers budge into your own work and arrangements with clients. Your freelance writing clients will almost always pay better than advertising so think about what it is that you really need. More better paying clients or a couple hundred dollars a month from that other writer advertising on your website?

I have a lot of people come to me when they need something written. In most cases, they are astounded that I can stand to write about the topic they need covered. Sometimes, they will tell me “I know plenty about this topic and if I needed to I could write a book about it. I just can’t sit myself down to write about it. It seems like so much ‘work’.” That is one of the reasons freelance writers are needed. We write about things others can’t, or just aren’t willing to write about. They view it as work, while any freelance writer in the business for a good experience should be in it to work with their passion.

Writing is a passion of mine. I write daily, several times a day, amounting to hours of time used to practice and apply what I know to the process. I write on several blogs. I write for my niche websites. I write ads and copy for my clients. I submit PLR content to get my name out. I don’t look at writing as a daunting task yet as a challenge that I want to take. I look forward to seeing what I can produce, and then how I can improve upon what I have just written. This is not work.

When people are asked, “Would you rather work at an office in a position you absolutely hated but made $10,000,000 a year, or at a job you love doing making average wage and working average hours?” more people opt-in for the second choice. 10,000,000 dollars is a lot to pass up, but what can you do with $10 million when you are absolutely miserable? If you are a freelance writer or a freelancer for any niche of work, and you are miserable making more money than you would at another more enjoyable job you could easily obtain, it might be time to reorganize your obligations.

I love what I do. Even if I was a horrible writer and it took me 4 hours to finish 500 word, as long as I loved it and kept putting passion into it, I wouldn’t stop. Having passion for the work you do is nearly essential, whether it is freelance writing or freelance graphic design or an office job. It is a driving force that will help you complete tasks with enthusiasm and thoroughness. Without my passion for writing, I would be copying and pasting other peoples’ content, right-clicking and changing a few adverbs, and emailing that to my clients. People are paying me to be passionate about my freelance writing skills. They aren’t paying me so I can be rich.

Passion translates into excellent work, and clients will know this when they see what you give them. Just like an excellent worker in an office who puts in the extra passion and effort to get that promotion, you may see a raise in your charges. While it might not be that 10 million dollars, if its something you love and you can get paid to do it, you have got nothing to lose.