I guess Finch can express himself  through his writings much better than I can. I share the same sentiments as him and this is exactly how I feel about affiliate marketing, my business and entrepreneurship in general.

I will post some of his excerpts here:

1. For many affiliate marketers, this is the reality. We’ve given up day jobs, broken free from the chains of a Monday-Friday 9-5. But fuck you if you think it came without sacrifice along the way.

2. My weekends? If I wasn’t out socializing, I was working. The only reason I ever managed it was because to me, it was never really work. It was my passion and a step towards where I wanted to be.

3. If you never made a single penny with affiliate marketing, would you still enjoy it?

4. It wasn’t the money I cared about, it was the entrepreneurism of generating something out of nothing on my lonesome.

5. If you’re stargazing at the apparently novel lifestyle of an affiliate marketer, ask him where he came from instead of where he is today.

To get to where we are today, we made a lot of sacrifices. The journey is not smooth sailing and we encounter lots of ups and down. Definitely not for the faint-hearted. LOL.

My dad even asked me why don’t I get a job back (I used to work as a sales engineer). He said I will have a steady paycheck, weekends with no worries, have a company car to drive. Life will be good in his opinions.

Well, I can only say I DON’T like that kind of life. Those who are business owners, internet marketers or self-employed will agree with me.

On a side note, I think my dad will have no complaints if I continue to bring food to the table every month.

• They don’t know how to do it
• They think it’s expensive
• They think they need to show their faces
• They think it’s tedious

Actually it is very simple to do video marketing now. You can use your existing articles and convert them into articles. Treat them as slide shows and present them into video format and upload to YouTube.

How to do it? Simple. By using Instant Video Articles. It’s a simple software that lets you churn out your articles into videos quickly. In fact, I did a demo and create a sample video using the software. Took me less than 5 minutes. Check out the video below.

You may think such software should be very expensive. Well, you are wrong. It cost only a one-time $17!

Click here and get Instant Video Articles now.

So last week, I listed one of my wedding niche’s site at Flippa.com. It’s the eBay for selling websites. The minimum starting bid I was willing to accept was USD147 and the BIN (buy it now) price was USD297. The auction lasted for 14 days. It was only during the last few days that bids were coming in. There were 2 bids initially before the 3rd bidder pop-up and bought my site at the BIN price.

Within a few days after selling my site, the seller realized that I have another niche wedding site. So he asked me whether I wanted to sell that site to him as well. Of course I accepted his proposal, because that’s the next site I want to sell in mind after the first deal was done!

The 2nd site was sold at a higher price at USD340, because the site was earning more money than the first site. So right now, you may ask me: “Why do you want to sell the site if it’s making money for you?” Well, the income earned from these 2 sites are minimum and I feel that it’s not worth my time to continue building them. So, I rather sell it -  let the new owner takes over and bring the sites to a higher level, which I feel I could not do it.

Actually, I was asking for $397. The buyer negotiated for $340. I accepted the deal because I was dealing with him directly this time round. That’s because getting your site listed on Flippa costs USD$19. If the site is successfully sold, you have to pay again a 5%  success fee based on the amount you sold it. I don’t have to pay all these “admin” fees, so I agreed to it. Just a side note: If nobody buys your site after the listing period, your $19 is gone. It’s non-refundable.

Initially I was a little worried about selling websites because I don’t really know the process of transferring websites. You know, you have to back up the SQL database and the wp files and export them to the new domain etc. But heck it, I just give it a try and during the listing period, I read up some guides on transferring sites. So theoretically, I know how to do it. LOL.

Luckily the buyer was quite experienced. I just had to zip up all the necessary files and send it to him as he can do it himself. All I need to do is to push my domain to his account and that’s it!

So the 2 websites were sold for USD$637 last week and I am happy about it.

However, due to some price changes to the products I am promoting, they are not really converting and the conversion rates drop drastically. My traffic is, in fact, increasing but the sales drop. So, I decided to venture into Clickbank once again. LOL.

So far, the results are promising. The site was up and running on 24th Mar and I got my first sale within 7 days. I only got 26 clicks, and I got the sale. And within the next few days I got another sale. So 2 sales so far with around 50+ clicks. The conversion rate looks good so far with the little traffic I generate.

As usual, I need to get more traffic (at least 500 CTR) before I can conclude whether the product can really convert.

The ways I generate traffic are still the same – it’s old-school but they still work like a charm: Publish good content on my blog, article marketing, directories submission, social bookmarking, carnival submission.

New tip for those who are using article marketing: http://www.thefreelibrary.com

It’s a PR7 site and you can submit your articles there! The highest PageRank for an article submission site I have seen so far. But don’t expect much traffic from there.  Just use it to build backlinks. It doesn’t hurt to have one more backlink from another article submission site . The Kingpin is still EzineArticles where you can get direct traffic from there.

This year, 2010, the next big thing is all about PPV (per-pay-view marketing). If you don’t know what PPV is, this site will be useful to you.

The craze has begun… Big-time marketers are selling their PPV courses, super affiliates are all mentioning about PPV.

As usual, there will be a sudden influx of marketers who will be trying to use PPV to make money online. And this is not good. In my opinion, the outcome will be the same like yester-year PPC craze. Profitable campaigns will become unprofitable.  Newbies will get burnt. Why? Because there were just too many people, all trying to use the same methods simultaneously.

It’s just like bubble tea or the donuts scenario in Singapore. Other people saw that selling donuts were profitable, so they copy and sold donuts as well. In the end, there are so many donuts stores springing up that people are sick of it and it became a fad.

Initially, I wanted to name my title as “Fad Marketing” but I realized that PPC is not a fad. PPC is here to stay. I can’t predict whether PPV is gonna to to be a fad or what, so I just coined the term “herd marketing” instead - that is following or applying a marketing method that everyone else is doing, such that it will lose its effectiveness.

If you are already into PPV long-time, milk the money while you still can. If you are a newbie, I suggest you don’t jump in now. You are too late and you will most likely to get burnt. Don’t follow what the masses are doing. It’s just like stocks – buy when people are selling and sell when people are buying.

People often ask me how do I build my links and there are 101 ways that you can build links. But the ones that I used often are:

1. Article Marketing
2. Directories Submission
3. Social Bookmarking
4. Blog Carnival
5. 3-Way Links

If you try do all the methods above by yourself manually, you will take countless of hours. That’s not a good use of your time. You need to outsource them. Free yourself up! Here are some of the software/services I used personally to outsource my SEO tasks.

Article Marketing

If you submit all the articles to the major article directories, you will take at least 1 hour+ to finish the job. PLEASE use a software to do it. The one I am using is Automatic Article Submitter. It will fill up your Title, Keywords, Article and Author Bio automatically, so you don’t have to copy-paste one by one. 15 min and you are done.

Directories, Social Bookmarking, Blog Carnival

WL Marketing is a SEO submission service company. I found them by chance around 1 year ago and they are a great help to me! Most importantly, their service is very affordable and efficient. For example, a submission to 80 dofollow social bookmarking sites only cost $10. That’s really cheap to me. Try submitting  80 sites yourself. You will take a few hours. I rather pay $10, cos’ my time is worth more than that!

3-Way Links

3-Way Links is a link-building “network” where site A is link to B, B link to C and C link back to A again. So, it’s one-way links and not reciprocal. Once you key in your anchor text link, it will generate 250 links over a period of time. Great for medium to low competition keywords.

I am sure you want some guidance or somebody who can teach you step-by-step. Singapore’s most famous internet marketer, Ewen Chia, has just launched a free training site which you can get access to step-by-step training videos that will teach you how to get started with your online business. Specifically, he will teach you how to do affiliate marketing, that is promoting somebody’s else products and you get a commission for each sale made.

Some of the videos lessons include:

• What is affiliate marketing
• How to get your affiliate link
• How to get domain name and hosting
• How to find a truly profitable topic
• How to find profitable affiliate products
• How to build your keyword list
• How to dominate the search engines EASILY
• Getting maximum conversion for your promotions
• and much more

If you are a complete newbie, I am sure these videos will benefit you and most importantly, they are free.

Of course, once you get into the member area, Ewen will recommend his paid products and other services. Don’t worry, there’s no obligation for you to buy. But I must say that, for a newbie, some of his products are pretty useful. I bought my first internet marketing product from him as well (that’s way back in 2006).

My advice? Go through the training videos, explore further yourself and take action. Don’t worry about “not knowing everything”. There is no perfect timing for you to get started. Learn as you do, do as you learn and refine along the way.

Click here to get access to those free training videos. Just fill up and name and email address and you are good to go.

Are you passionate about internet marketing?

We are recruiting a highly motivated Online Marketing Executive who has done either one of the following:
- manage your own blogshop
- spend at least 2 hours on Facebook every day.
- has a Twitter account and actively tweet.
- indulge in online affiliate marketing, familiar with Google Adsense.
- built a website
- or has managed a PPC campaign before.

As our Online Marketing Executive you will be the online marketing advisor to our clients, their “go-to” person for anything concerning online marketing. You will assist in diagnosing their problem and working out a viable online marketing solution to achieve their business goals.

You will also work with internal and external resource in the delivery, ensuring the business goals, budget and timeline are met.

If you have a passion in internet marketing, this would certainly be a fun environment for you.

If I saw this job ad when I graduated from university last May (2008), I would definitely apply for this position.

Just wondering what’s the salary for this “online marketing executive” position? Maybe somebody can apply for it, go for the interview and tell me about it. LOL.

Seriously, for those who have YET to become as a full-time online marketer (you will make it sooner or later), this is like a “dream job” – doing what you love.

You said some of your sites are becoming authority sites and you are getting some good organic traffic – if you don’t mind sharing, how are you doing this?

I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for several years, and make decent part-time money, but my sites that 3-4 years ago used to dominate the search engine rankings are now nowhere near the top.

The reply I gave:

As I mentioned in my post, my biggest site has more than 100 posts. That’s already more than 100 pages of solid content.

The things I did are simple, nothing fanciful.

1. Just submitting articles to the regular directories (with desired anchor text)
2. Updating my blog aggressively when just starting out
3. Look for other authority sites that allowed users to post articles/content
4. Engage in forums (when I first started out)
5. Social bookmarking (to get back links)

Once you do all these CONSTANTLY with QUALITY content, search engines will start ranking you and you will get organic traffic. I use wordpress blogs as my site platform, because it’s very search engine friendly.

And a thing to add, I don’t spin articles like what other marketers did. I hired writers to write unique articles for me. I feel that is important. Quality content provides value to people and SE likes it.

You said some of your sites dominate the SE many years back. Did you constantly update your site?

I believed if you wanna stay on top, you have to “maintain’ your site. Either get backlinks steadily over time or update your site, or else other competitor can come in and kill the competition.

The important stuffs are the highlighted words above. And the key to success is the word: CONSISTENT. Building an authority requires time and hard work. You don’t slap a site up with just 5 pages of content and expect it to rank no. 1 for competitive keywords. Whatever you do, do it better than your competitor.

Of course, many affiliates will cry foul who are earning huge incomes from affiliate commissions. And mind you, these are same affiliates who are spending BIG money on PPC to feed Google’s revenue. So why is Google biting its own hand? Well, it’s dead simple. Just 2 words – User Experience

Actually, if you look at the big picture. It’s a good thing that Google did a clean-up.

Time to kick the ass off those bogus product reviews. Let’s face it. Those product reviews are not really “reviews”. Just some marketers trying to promote the highest commissions product. No real content. Just superficial “reviews’ plastered with affiliate links. Of course, I am a savvy Internet user and marketer. I will not fall for such tricks. BUT normal folks will fall into it, thinking it’s a genuine review.

What happens if the products that those folks purchased are scammy or bogus? NOT a good user experience for the consumers. They search through Google and they bought bogus products or scammy opportunities.

So, in my opinion, what Google did is right. I also do my research through Google, buy products online and search through Google again for legitimate product reviews. I want the information I gathered to be be relevant and true as well. Remember, we are USERS ourselves.

Having said that, I also pity those affiliates who just rely only on PPC  to make a living. Maybe from 5 figures to barely next to nothing. So, the important thing to learn from such incident is to diversify your income sources.

Don’t just rely on PPC to get traffic. Don’t just rely on 1-2 campaigns to make all your money. Don’t just rely on Google.

I know it’s hard not to rely on Google, as they are the Kingpins right now. But what you need to do is to diversify as much as you can.

Don’t “make money online”, instead build a business that can lasts. Such as building an authority site that provides good quality content, thus providing values for readers or consumers. It is all about providing value to people. And yes, please adhere to Google’s rules and regulation. No black hat and provide value-adding websites.