I hate ebooks about how to make money online. You see them everywhere and they range in price from single digits all the way into the thousands. The authors all claim to have the best and only “system” or ways to make money you will ever need. If you think about it, why are they offering to tell you their secret and not just doing it themselves? Is it because they can make more by selling their “system” than they can by actually doing their system?
I have bought a handful of these work from home jobs books, just like you probably have, and never once did I feel that I got very much of value in return. Most ebooks will give you nothing more than a lot of general information that you can find online for free. The fact is that half of these ebooks are probably written by people who’s only source of income online is selling the very book you just bought! They probably don’t know much more than you do other than how to gather information off the Internet and put it into ebook form.
The prices they charge for their ebooks on how to make money online is often ridiculous. How many times have you bought a book in Barnes & Noble for $27.00 or more? I never have and it would have to be a very thick good looking book that I have skimmed right there in the store for me to shell out that kind of money. Why then are people willing to spend that on an Internet download that they know nothing about other than the authors trumped up sales pitch on how he is going to teach you better than anyone else how to make money online?
I frequent the “make money forums” and continually see posts from people who are frustrated and have yet to make a dime. Some have been trying for a week, others for 6 months, and some even for years. This post of how I made my first $2,000 online is for you. It is for anyone and everyone who is and has been frustrated by Internet marketing and just doesn’t know where to start. It shows that it can be done by someone who knows absolutely nothing.
This is an actual STEP BY STEP guide of how I made my first $2000 in affiliate marketing. My methods were a bit primitive but nevertheless I did it and I made that money without spending a dime. This is EXACTLY how I did it and I want to say again I did it with ZERO out of pocket expense to me and that I did it in about 3 1/2 months time. Not too bad for an absolute beginner.
STEP ONE
Pick an affiliate product to sell. This unfortunately may be one of the hardest steps and you could fail on your first try. There are so many products to choose from and so few ways to find out which ones are selling and may be the right ones for you to try to sell. I suggest signing up at ClickBank or Commission Junction. You want to make sure that the first product or products you try to sell are not Internet marketing related. Selling “how to make money online” products is almost impossible when you yourself don’t know how to do it. Leave that to the more experienced people.
You want to start out selling things to people who are less apt to understand that you are trying to sell them something so that you can get a commission. My parents, for example, would be a great target audience. They have no idea that some links are affiliate links and others are not.
My first products were the two Warcraft guides (Joana’s and Brian Kopp’s) which are sold through ClickBank. I might have gotten lucky that Warcraft was one of the especially hot online RPG games at that time (that’s why I chose them) and within about 2 weeks of starting I was making an average of about a sale a day. Not everyday was the same, some days I might have made 3 sales and other days none, but one a day was the average.
I then diversified a little and also started selling some health related items from Commission Junction. Those were targeted at women who I thought might be a little less likely to know about or care about what an affiliate link was.
Step Two
After you have selected a product that you would like to sell, you need a destination for your prospective buyers to go. You need a webpage of some sort. I wanted to start out for free and therefore did not want to buy a domain. I did not know how to buy a domain and if I got one would not have known what to do with it. I had heard so much about Wordpress and Blogger as being great free blogging platforms that I signed up with both of them. I must say that I did not know anything about their terms of service and I still don’t (I don’t need to anymore because I have my own domains). I have heard that some users have had their accounts terminated for having too many affiliate links on their free blogs. Just remember that if you open up a free blog you really don’t own it. Keep that in mind before you spend too much time making it look just perfect.
(Since I wrote this I have been told that affiliate links are against the TOS for Wordpress. Nevertheless, I got away with it but you should try Blogger instead. Just do a similar thing with Blogger as I have outlined below)
Step Three
I started with Wordpress so I will use them as an example. Click on the “sign up now” button which will take you to a screen that will ask you for a username, password, and email address. Pick your username and password and type in your email and click the “Next” button. You will be taken to a page that looks like this:
This page is where you will choose your blog name (domain). Pick a name that is sort of neutral. In other words, pick a name that can go with any product you may decide to sell such as “reviewsite” or “reviewweb”. Don’t pick a name like “JoesBlog” because that will look strange if you are promoting things on it. Finish filling out that page and press “Signup”. If you have no errors and have picked a blog name that no one else has then it will take you to the final page that looks like the picture below.
Step Four
Now that you have a blog and have named it, the next step is to choose a layout for your blog. You will need to get into the “Dashboard” of your blog and click on the “Presentation” tab along the top. Once you do that you will find about 5 pages of thumbnail pictures of the different blog layouts you can choose from. I suggest choosing one that looks the simplest and the least like a “blog’ that you can find. I have had success with the “Wordpress Classic” theme that is shown on the 5th page (at the time of this writing) of the blog layout choices.
Click on the theme you decide is best (you can easily change it if you decide to later) and then click the “Activate This Theme” in the upper right hand corner. Another good theme you might try is the “White As Milk” theme on the same page.
Step Five
The next thing I did was to make a landing page on my blog where the visitors would “land” and hopefully click my link to the seller’s ad. For this I did a lot of copying and pasting. I went to Brian Kopp’s Warcraft front sales page and copied sections of his page and then pasted it on to mine. I had to do a lot of tinkering with this as things don’t always copy/paste as you want them to. Centering things and aligning them was another challenge for me as a beginner but with a lot of trial and error I got it to look OK.
To get the page as clean as possible I had to delete everything I could find like the default post and the blogroll. I then had to click the “presentation” tab and then the “widgets” sub-tab to get to the sidebar. I then dragged the “links” widget up into the sidebar which got rid of some of the other stuff on the side of the blog. Also, go here if you need to know how to make a basic hyperlink.
For this tutorial I have opened up a free Wordpress blog (called “reviewmeplease”) and I have recreated the exact landing page I made when I first started out. It is not for the Warcraft guide but for another ClickBank product. Click HERE to see that example of the landing page I made for the “Stop Sweating and Start Living” ebook. All the affiliate links have been disabled. It looks like Wordpress shut this example blog down even though I had no links on it. This is why you need to use Blogger or have your own domain.
This is not the best landing page you will ever see and in fact it is quite poor. However, I did it all for free and that was what I wanted. I hoped that I could get a few potential buyers to my page and they would be interested enough in learning the “Stop Sweating” secret that they would click through to the more professional seller’s page. Once there, it was up to the seller to make the sale. My job was just to get them there.
Step Six
Now I had to get targeted traffic to my site/blog/landing page(s). I used Craigslist exclusively for this. You have to make sure you post your ads in the correct sections or they will get flagged for sure. In the case of the Stop Sweating product I posted my ad under “Services Offered’ and then “Beauty Services” and it looked something like this:
Do Away With Those Underarm Sweat Problems (Title)
This book will reveal a 100% all-natural step by step
process that you can use to quickly and easily
eliminate your underarm sweat problems forever.
Please click HERE for more information.
I made 5 variations of this ad which was quite easy to do and I had each variation on an Excell spreadsheet. I would then make a post of each ad variation in five different cities. I could then change Craigslist email accounts (I had 10 of them) and make the same posts again in 5 more cities. I had to be very careful not to get too ambitious and post too much as I would then run the risk of having every ad flagged and deleted. You can read my article about how to post to multiple cities on Craigslist to see how I did it.
That is exactly how I made my first $2,000 dollars in affiliate marketing without spending a dime. I just kept posting on Craigslist which brought free targeted traffic to my blog/ad and sales started trickling in. I was making $16+ per sale of the Warcraft guides and $20 to $25 on a couple other health related products. It took about 3 1/2 months from my first sale to make $2000.00 and my expenses were ZERO.
It was very beneficial for me to start for free as I needed to build up my confidence. In the very beginning, I was a pure 100% newbie and I did not know whether I could ever make a sale. I had to find out somehow and I certainly didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars in the process. I learned a lot and figured out that, yes, you can make money online after all.
As I previously mentioned, I believe the biggest challenge is picking the right product. It remains that way for me to this day. Again I stress to pick products that will appeal to the general public – the everyday man or woman. DO NOT TRY TO SELL THINGS TO THE MAKE MONEY ONLINE INTERNET MARKETING CROWD.
The sheer number of products available to try to sell makes the decision tough. My related article discusses how you can test affiliate products on Cragslist for free. Craigslist is a wonderful resource if you learn how to use it but it requires patience as some of your ads will be flagged and deleted no matter what you do. Just remember that it is free and “free” is a very nice cost.
I hope you have gotten some value from this step by step guide to how I made my first sales in Internet marketing. There are many ways to get started but this one worked for me. Let me know if you have any questions or comments by leaving me a note in the “comments” field.
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great post.You give the best in depth examples
Thank you Mike.
Great step by step guide here, and I can tell Clickbank is something that really works in the online moneymaking world. I hadn’t given it much thought before, and just for kicks signed in the other day to see a sale had been made, from a Squidoo lens!
Squidoo might be the best “FREE” method to use for promotions early on as they don’t seem to care about affiliate links. Wordpress I have noticed doesn’t like you selling any thing on their free blog, so self-hosting might be best there.
Monetizer,
Yes, Squdoo is also a great for a free option when you are just getting started. HOWEVER, I have tried 4 or 5 times to link to a Squidoo lens from Craigslist and each time my ad was IMMEDIATELY flagged and deleted. I don’t think you are allowed to send Craigslist users to Squidoo.
I ran across your website when I was trolling Blog Catalog. You have a great raw writing style. I hope you make it to your goal in 2010. You seem like an intense personality?
I agree that choosing the product is a challenge. Most people will go for IM products as they are highly demand products and addresses a bigger audience. You are right to advice to go for more niche market as the audience will less IM savvy.
A great step by step guide for newbies!
Are you still doing this dayjobnuker? If so, how many of these sites do you have now? Is it very time consuming?
I don’t have any of those anymore. I got tired of listing on Craigslist everyday and I am spending more time here than on anything else.
Very similar to what I am doing right now, good tutorial.
Thanks for the inside peek, the craigs list examples are novel, I’ve only read about them one other place, and I think it was from you!
While you are not still doing this method, are you still earning money via clickbank products, just self hosted? How are you getting traffic?
Suzanne,
Only a little on ClickBank anymore. So many of their products are really bad. I make some with Commission Junction as they have real companies with real products. I’ve gotten kind of lazy lately I’m afraid. A bit of burnout.
[...] DayJobNuker shows us step by step how he made $2000 online. [...]
[...] GeniusTypes.com 2- 5,263 Words On Starting A Profitable Blog by Courtney at CourtneyTuttle.com 3- How I Made My First $2,000 In Affiliate Marketing – A Step By Step Guide by Bruce at DayJobNuker.com 4- Money Can Be Made Online by Garry at GarryConn.com 5- How I Have [...]
Great post! Can you explain more on your CL posting strategy? You do 3 cities per email, 7 emails per day? How often to you repost? Do you repost into the same category with the same ad? All info appreciated.
JJ
JJ,
I just try to never post more than 15 to 20 new posts per day. By “new” I can also mean relists. When an ad expires I automatically relist it so many days I am only relisting ads.
Thanks for the quick answer!
OK. So 15-20/day means 15-20 different cities for one product. And then seven products (one a day) to cover the seven-day post expiration period?
Thanks again
JoJo,
This was my quote “I have now settled on posting a maximum of 3 ads per each email account and using about 7 of my different email addresses per day.”
I am not sure what you are asking but it is not that hard. I may make 15 to 20 posts per day using a variety of email accounts and so forth. I am not as scientific as you are wanting me to be.
BTW, I have kind of burned out on posting everyday so I don’t do that much but I think you can easily get away with doing that much. If you are having trouble then you need to rewrite your ads or you are linking to something that people think is too spammy.
How I Made My First $2,000 In Affiliate Marketing – A Step By Step Guide…
This is step by step how I got my start in affiliate marketing without spending anything. This is more information than you will read in most ebooks and you can start today….
Excellent article. I’ve created a website that I am hopeing to turn into a search service for music. Right now it’s not much, but eventually I hope to have thousands of songs listed for sale. This type of article gives new ideas on marketing. I must be too old, never thought about craigslist.
Earnosphere: Week Ending 3/11/07…
I’d thought it’d be good to give some other blogs some love at the end of every week, thus the Earnosphere is born. Basically any posts or techniques that I think have the ability to help you increase your income I’ll try to include….
I need to learn your secrets about craigslist. I followed their rules and had trouble keeping a perfectly legit job posting for a web designer for our company live for more than a few hours.
This s the guide Ive been waiting for. Ive been making money with adsense and would love to try affiliate marketing but dont know where to start. Thanks for the tip.
I have never posted anything in the job section of Craigslist so I am not sure what gets flagged over there. There is no doubt, however, that a lot of legitimate ads get flagged in all sections and I don’t know what to say other than you have to learn to live with it and keep posting. I know it can be frustrating.
[...] How I Made My First $2,000 In Affiliate Marketing – A Step By Step Guide posted by DayJobNuker. [...]
[...] (love that name) has an interesting post about making money through affiliate offers and Craigslist marketing. I like the post because he goes step by step with practical [...]
[...] the DayJob Nuker made a post making his first $2000 with affiliate marketing, the sad fact is most “affiliate [...]
Great post. First one I read at your site. I’m going to sign up for your RSS feed.
Hey DayJobNuker,
Good job on this guide. I’ve been using Craiglist marketing for a while and it certainly works well! I faced the same problems as you at first, but then i started using a Craiglist autoposter to make life easier
— Dev
You actually just posted a lot of announcements on Craiglist to drive people to your website. Smart one, I have to say.
Not a lot, a few maybe. I think 5 or so.
[...] forewarned: The traffic generating method DayJobNuker describes in his How I Made My First $2,000 in Affiliate Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide is not within the rules, so to speak, but the bulk of his “business plan” is very much [...]
Hi there,
Thanks an great guide. I’ve been trying this latly to try and drive traffic thru craigslist to my aff site. The problem is that when i try to post adds on craigslist, everything goes well and it tells me it will be live in 15 mins. After awhile i check and it is green on my account and should have been published. If i click the link to the post i find it but its not linked from the category (theraputic services)where i posted it. Also there is no way to search and find it. So people have no way to get to it. Anyone else who this happend to?
Another question. Do you know any good free sites that are like craigslist?
BR,
Fiskebutik
Fiskebutik,
I don’t know of any site that is worthwhile other than Craigslist. I have heard of a few others (I can’t remember their names) but when I went there they had very little activity. Not worth even listing there.
As to your other problem I am not sure if I can help you as I have not experience that myself.
Your post has made it to the top 10. I deleted 23 post and you made it. Since there are only 10 articles in the carnival it would not be hard to get notice. I recommend that you stumbleupon the carnival post to bring some traffic and increase your chance of getting traffic from my post to yours.
Make Money Online Tips & Tricks – November 7, 2007 Blog Carnival
[...] How I Made My First $2,000 In Affiliate Marketing – A Step By Step Guide [...]
Hello, I have posted about 15 posts yesterday following your above info, then went to post today for a different product I had made a landing page for and got one up then the rest are blocked. Did you have some thing like this happen? if so what was your work around?
Silly Silly me, I figured it out, Let any one who has the same problem know what it was – I was posting to craigslist the clickbank url instead of my landing page url on the Click Here hyper link. Thanks anyway, sorry to waste your time !
Hi,
Just wonder how much people manage to make using this? I post like 10 ads a day and manage only to get like 20-30 visitors a day. No sale so far, but i keep hoping. After 400 hits and no sale i guess i should move on to another products? Could be a good addon if i could keep making like 500-1000 a month on this + other projects and soon i could nuke my day job:)
Fiskerullar,
Yes, a few more hundred hits and if you still have no sale by then, maybe it is time to choose another affiliate product. The traffic is free though
Do you know if Commision Junction requires you to have a landing page?
I was trying to take a URL and just redirect it to the CJ link. I made a purchase but a sale never showed up. I am wondering since all CJ text links include an image tag that removing that image tag causes you to lose the tracking.
I don’t know the answer to that Budgetboy as I have only used them on blogs. Maybe someone else knows the answer?
Do you still recommend this technique to earn a few bucks on craigslist? I ask because once a make money idea gets posted the spammers jump on board and then the idea isn’t any good.
Jim,
I don’t see any reason why you can’t still do it today. There are tons of affiliate products out there and if you choose a good one you should make some sales. Health products maybe?
My only other question is how do you make a text link inside your ad? I see some ads that have the full url but it’s not clickable and some are.
Please go to http://dayjobnuker.com/2007/06/12/how-to-make-a-basic-link/ to find out how
very nice post.affiliate marketing explained in an gr8 way.
For certain products, (“make money” or “Sell digital items” books not included) craigslist can still work well. I have sold quite a few of my own soccer book with pre planned practices.
I think it is because it is easier to put an ad together that doesn’t get flagged, and because when people do reply, what you have isn’t too far off from a traditional printed book, which is what they expect.
You have to realize, many people on leery of buying digital items and giving their credit card info (in their mind) to someone that has contacted them through craigslist. It is all about establishing trust. I actually just finished a little book on my marketing methods on craigslist, which you can read about by clicking my website.
Thanks for the advice. I really appreciate people shairng their ideas to make money online
Thanks to share your idea with us I am sure this idea also work for us.
I like this post and will definitly try it. The only thing I don’t like is craigslist. I have tried posting ads on craigslist before and they always get flagged.
Real great of you to share your idea, I guess some patience, trial and error, and anyone will be able to manage this and ‘work from home’.
Thank you
Hey DayJobNuker,
Interesting article. How are things going now? Do you have any follow up news to share? I can
relate to many of the experiences that
you’ve discussed.
Wayne
http://www.YourOnlineBusinessAdvisor.com
Nice informative steps on how to earn cash online without even spedning a dime. There arrn’t very many articles out there that show you this, most of them want you to pay first and you provide this information free of charge.
am i allowed to craiglist or something like that my clickbank affiliate links without blog/site?
Ash,
Are you asking whether you are allowed to put your affiliate links on Craigslist that take the readers directly to the product rather than your own landing page? If that is what you are asking the answer is “NO”. Craigslist users will flag that kind of ad almost faster than you can put it up.
Great post. Very detail and easy to follow. Will try to follow these steps and see the results. Thanks
Im glad ya took the time to make this post as detailed as possible. Thank you!
Hello,
I just wrote a very basic 10 page e-book on the basics of craigslist. Without getting into specifics, it should give you a solid grasp on what works and what doesn’t work, and why. Check out my site to download it for free.
I think this is a helpful post and agree with some of the comments but not about ebooks. I have been affiliate marketing for ten years and learnt the hard way but recently I have invetsed in some ebooks and courses and as long as your careful in which ones you choose they can really help.
I need shortcuts because I know how to earn money but improving and growing my business requires new knowledge and new thinking..
The books I have read have helped me open my mind to new challenges and practices..you can’t generalize they are all useless. be fair..
Thank you for this.
I have been struggling with affiliates ever since the launch of my website.