These days the internet and in particular affiliate marketing make a mockery of my profession. Articles are in constant demand for affiliate websites and a 500 word article costs about $6-10 from one of the writing sweat shops that are around.

Complaints are rife about the quality of the writing and the lack of knowledge about search engine optimisation.

Well you get what you pay for, monkeys for peanuts.

So as you may have gathered there’s no point in asking me to write for a pittance like that. My fees are $25 per hour and 1 article is 1 hour regardless of its length.

In fact I am considering dropping out of the web content market, if I had to rely on that I ‘d be better off working in a bar.

Some time ago I wrote an article for EzineArticles called The Affiliate Minefield which took a rather cynical view of the whole Internet affiliate business. Well two years on and I thought I would revisit the subject with fresh and maybe better informed opinions.

I recently received a free Ebook from Jim Edwards; one of your typical rags to riches guys, which was all about mindsets. Now normally I would dismiss this, as I just turn off when any form of mental sales therapy crops up. But I did actually read this and to my surprise found myself agreeing with what was written, albeit rather reluctantly.

The gist of it was that you are where you are today because of decisions you have made in your past. If you’re rich or poor, destitute or affluent, it is you, and nobody else, who is responsible and only you can change it. Everybody gets tough breaks but some people get over it and rise above it and others don’t.

Enough of the preaching, so how does this relate to the Internet world? Well succeeding in the on-line world is no different to succeeding in the off-line world; you simply have to have the discipline, tenacity and right work ethic to succeed. Above all you must maintain FOCUS and not become a butterfly, flitting from one tasty looking morsel to another.

Everyday your email gets flooded with the latest offers and simple ways to get rich and by now you are probably well aware that this just aint the case. There is lots of free help and advice on the net, most of which is genuinely useful and a fair amount of work has gone into some of the free goodies that are currently around. Ok there is an ulterior motive whereby the authors of these freebies hope to gain your trust in order to get you buying their products. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, we do after all live in a capitalist society.

Only one thing matters when trying to make money online and that is CONVERSIONS. Copywriters earn fortunes writing long, really long, sales letters persuading you to take action and buy now. Personally I find them extremely tedious and I shouldn’t think anybody reads a whole letter without skimming. There again, general opinion seems to say that they actually work so who am I to criticise.

In order to get conversions you need TRAFFIC and this is the key element in any marketing campaign. It’s a percentage game where you can generally expect a 1-3% conversion rate so lots of traffic is essential – targeted traffic that is. It’s a complete waste of time having thousands of visitors to your offer who have no interest in it at all. Traffic can be bought, most commonly by Pay Per Click (PPC) or gained organically by means of getting lots of back links to a well optimised website. Needless to say if you’re paying for traffic, untargeted traffic is an expensive disaster.

Both these traffic methods are real stumbling blocks to most people; they are not rocket science but not far off, particularly PPC. The learning curve is often tough but if PPC is implemented correctly it is the fastest way to get traffic. Organic traffic is much slower to take effect and is also hard, tedious work with no guarantees at the end of it. All this work is to appease the mighty King Google who rules the airwaves with an iron fist that takes no prisoners and whose reign shows no sign of abating.

It’s easy to think that everyone’s a con merchant on the net and all these screenshots of healthy looking Clickbank/Paypal accounts are just not true. Well they probably are true but it doesn’t do much for anyone struggling online. There is no simple answer to internet success and people have got rich by capitalising on other peoples failures, so find a method you are comfortable with and focus on it, shrug off dud products and find others and the law of averages will tell you that one of them will work.

Input a keyword phrase in inverted commas, for this example “guitar courses”

Now go to the bottom of the page – click on the last page

Er – what’s happened here? Looks like we only have 696 competitors to worry about not 44,000

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you’ll see there were in fact only 8 pages and not 10!!

A mystery indeed – and no I don’t have an explanation as yet, but watch this space

CPA Offer

The most common way to make money on the net is via affiliate marketing whereby you promote someone else ’s product through your own website and receive a reasonable commission if a sale is made.

With CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) you get paid for leads, not sales. The commissions on the main are lower than affiliate ones, typically between $1 – $6 as opposed to $30 – $40. However some CPA commissions can be extremely high for health, mortgage and insurance markets and the traffic/ conversion rate is very much better.

Affiliate Offer

Anybody, and his dog, can sign up to Affiliate offers but CPA networks are a lot fussier and will actually call you up and quiz you as to your competence for promoting their offers. On the whole, CPA offers look much more professional than most affiliate ones and get straight to the point therefore converting better

Whatever you promote on the net only two things matter – Traffic and Conversion and thereby hangs another tale.

How Google ranks ads, sets its prices, decides upon the quality of your ad has always been seen as secretive and vague. Well this video from Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, explains it all. Mind you, you may well have to view it a few times to understand it – I certainly had to – but it is all there in the open for all to see.

If you click the arrow in the bottom right corner you will get access to more adwords videos

Well one guy has indeed all these riches but still comes across as a normal average sort of person with a good sense of the struggle you may be having.  This is undoubtedly the key to his enormous success and he is the darling of the IM fratenity at the moment.

Chris Rempel produces simple products about strategy called VIP reports which cost around $19 – $27.  They tell you what you should do, where to find out the info and give you some examples of successful results.  What they dont do is tell you how to actually do it and this is what a lot of people get annoyed about.

One of Chris’s biggest sellers is the Conduit Method whereby you knock up a pretty basic review site about the product you are promoting and then just give the facts without any actual selling. You also include feedback from actual users as well. Apparently it is a very successful business model – hasn’t worked for me mind – still thats life.

• So how do you write reviews about something you dont own or even know about?
• Where does all this user feedback come from?
• How long does all this take to research?

Where do I find the answers to these questions – now that’s another story

But oh no, the typical electronic sales letter goes on and on and I  am sure I’m not the only one that gets really pissed off about it? As a writer I am able to distinguish between wheat and chaff, I generally scroll to the bottom line get the price and if it’s within my budget make some attempts to find the real bits of info I require amongst all this chaff. If I click off the site and get “Before you go – look at this special offer we have——” Well that ensures I will never return to that site again.
I just need to know

• What the product does
• What it can do for me
• What it can’t do for me
• Evidence that it works
• How much it costs

K.I.S.S

Now the bidders for these 100 articles requests can easily achieve this and it requires no great skill to do so. The article could be pure junk, poor quality english, full of useless information but still pass the google test. These site owners care little about this as their main site monetisation is probably Adsense whereby they get paid every time somebody clicks one of their sites ads. The sweat shop writers do themselves no favours at all and do nothing other than ensure the quality of web content remains low.

The internet is, or should, be about the distribution of useful and helpful information and become an informative and enjoyable experience for the reader. Writing good quality SEO articles is a skilled job and deserves fair compensation, it’s a case of pay peanuts – get monkeys.