Bass Akwards is how I have been working on this blog.  I have been so wrapped up in getting my other websites up and running, that I haven’t didn’t make the time to write entries into a blog that is supposed to be my personal journal about my ups and downs entering the cut throat world of Internet affiliate marketing.  As of this moment, I haven’t made a dime and the traffic to my site is close to none.  I have made several newbie mistakes; however, I am learning from them.   I figure the best way to to tell my story is to start from the beginning and share everything that I have learned up to this point by sprinkling breadcrumbs across a series of blog entries.

I have to give credit to my wife for getting me motivated “once I started to actually listen to her” to give this Internet affiliate marketing a try.  She had been downloading eBooks and subscribing to many different affiliate marketing sites for over a year.  She couldn’t understand why I wasn’t interested considering I am an Internet geek.  As usual with most things with me, if I am not motivated I don’t bother.  However, once I am motivated at a task, I am a obsessive  compulsive driven individual.  I decided that I wanted to start my venture by using Niche Review Templates from the monthly subscription my wife belonged to.  Niche Review Templates is promoted as the easiest way to earn cash.  They build the web pages, articles and keywords. From that point all you have to do is get a hosting site, register a domain name, get a ClickBank account and sit back and count your money.  The video how-to’s were very informative.

I initially create five websites from the niche review templates, without any regard to thinking about if the niche market was profitable, SEO, content, traffic and so forth.  While I was setting the websites up, I continued doing research on my own to get a better understanding about search engines, creating successful websites, and writing good content.  The beautiful thing about the internet is that you can always peek in on the individuals who are successful to figure out what you’re trying to do.  It was about three weeks ago that I came to the conclusion that the niche review templates that I used to create websites wasn’t going to get me very far.  This isn’t a direct knock against the guys who run the Niche Review Templates website. They do give you the tools to help you get 3/4 of the way; however, there were some missing pieces that needed filling in.

The first important missing piece to the puzzle is that I should have done research prior to selecting my domain names.  I came to this realization once I began to understand the importance of keywords and their purpose.  The second thing I figured out was that if I was going to make any kind of money off the niche review websites, I needed to turn them into blogs and figure out a way to get traffic to them.  This also meant that I needed to add a crash course in learning WordPress while continuing to research to get a better understanding of Internet affiliate marketing.  My next blog post will continue detailing my journey by discussing my thoughts on WordPress and why I can never look at the internet the same way every again.

It has been sometime since I last updated this blog.  I have been busy “bloggerizing”, a term I made up, the five niche sites that I initially built when I initially got started this internet marketing endeavor.  Before I go any further, I would like to mention, that none of this would be possible without the loving support of my wife.  It was her suggestion that it would make more sense in the long run to invest time learning internet affiliate marketing than wasting needless hours sending out resumes.  She is totally disgusted by the fact, that someone as talented as myself can’t seem to get a break, especially in this rough job market.

As of the moment, I still haven’t earned a dime.  However, I am excited by the fact that I am getting some traffic on the sites.  I am determined to figure out the inner workings of the SEO “Search Engine Optimization” Voodoo, and use it to drive traffic to my sites and begin earning some cash.  Internet Affiliate Marketing is a cut throat business — it is not for the weak at heart.  I think it takes a certain level of patience and commitment to succeed in the business.  I find the technology aspect of Internet Affiliate Marketing to be fascinating.   I am having a lot of fun learning how to develop web pages as well as figuring out how search engines work.  Speaking of search engines,  the dirty little secret behind them is that no one outside the companies that develop them truly knows how they work.    It’s the ultimate game of smoke and mirrors.  What worked three years ago doesn’t work now, and what works today probably will not work in the future.  What I have surmised from my countless hours of reading articles from various SEO experts is that the search engine is constantly evolving.  The process of figuring out what search engines like is at best an educated guess.    The parts that make up the algorithms that search engines use is constantly moving.  If anyone claims to know the absolute truth about search engines they are flat out lying.