A Good Day

Well, I've been in the affiliate marketing realm for a couple of years... Actually I should say, I started, quit and came back and all that happened in a couple of years. It's a difficult thing, there are days where I promise myself that I'll never ever launch another campaign or promote another affiliate offer ever again and there are days like today, which are quite the opposite.

Launching a new campaign is always exciting. The idea of showing your ad to thousands and thousands of people, it's empowering. I am a firm believer in banner advertising. This is your opportunity to be rewarded for your own creativity. PPC is boring, there isn't much you can do creatively speaking, it's also very difficult.

With PPC the work has already been done, somebody has already advertised a product so well that it caused somebody to go search for it in Google or Bing or Yahoo or whatever. Nobody searches for something they don't know exists. That is why PPC is so expensive and usually brings an affiliate nothing but frustration. Banner ads, on the other hand, give you the opportunity to create the interest, which is where the money is.

Banner ads are a form of "interruption marketing" which basically means you're getting your ad in front of somebody who isn't necessarily looking for what you have to offer. You have exactly 160x600 or 300x250 or 728x90 pixels to create enough interest to cause that person to click. Which is where the magic happens and that is where the money is when it comes to banner advertising. Anybody can go onto Google and pay for clicks, that's easy, why would they pay an affiliate to do that for them. But not just anybody can generate the interest, that's where affiliates have the opportunity to make cash.

When I first got started in affiliate marketing I assumed that all I'd have to do is log into adwords throw up some keywords for an offer and watch my bank account grow... I didn't realize how disconnected from reality I was. I would look at my account and see that I had spent about $100, then I'd log into my affiliate account (clickbank at the time) and see about the same amount... I thought it was pretty lame that I would spend $100 and make $100, that wasn't going to do anything for me.

It wasn't until I realized that I was doing what anybody could do, why should I earn money if it's that easy?

This post has been a bit all over the place but the point is this, people won't pay you for something they can easily do themselves. If you want to make it in affiliate marketing you have to do something they can't do... so dig deep and find what that is and soon you'll be having days like today... an extra hundred bucks in your pocket for about 10 minutes of ad creation.