The Nicher

Here’s a clever guy who uses his artistic skills to promote his marketing products.  Even if you have no interest in what he’s selling, if you’re into internet marketing, you’ll want to check these comics out.

I logged in to Commission Junction, as I do every day, to check my stats.  Not surprising.  I have a click through rate of 20% most days, and yet no sales.  But I checked the reports section anyway.  Lo and behold- a pending commission of $3.24!  Woot!

This is my first commission from BANS, and it’s larger than most first commissions (from reports that I’ve heard- I can’t back that up).  Granted, I’ve got a long way to go to reach payout, let alone make back my investment.  But it definitely gives me hope.  I think I have all of 1 paragraph of content on the page that produced the sales.

And then I logged in to Squidoo and saw that I’d earned another $0.83 from an Amazon module.  I’m not retiring yet, but what a great start!

I was talking to a friend at work about my websites.  He knows that I’m a bit addicted to BANS, despite the fact that I haven’t made back my investment yet.

He’s been interested in making a living online for a while as well, but he’s better at planning than I am.  Me, I get an idea and I fly with it. He actually takes classes.  We’ve always said that if we were one person, we’d probably be rich.  I think as partners we’d kill each other. 

He was only interested in the basic numbers, so that’s what I gave him.  I said, domains are about $10 a year.  I know where I can get codes to get either 10% off, or domains for $7 a year through GoDaddy, so that’s who I use.  I also told him that .info domains are about $2-3.  I wouldn’t recommend getting a .info domain if you want to build up repeat viewers, but for a site that relies on search engines for traffic, you could certainly do worse.

Hosting totally depends on what you want.  I told him that I pay about $8 a month with HostGator for unlimited domains.  I also told him that if he wanted just one website to build up, he can get hosting even cheaper than that for just one site.  I didn’t tell him about dedicated servers and such, because I don’t think either of us expects to become popular enough to need it- and if we do?  Then we celebrate!

He’s also interested in my affiliate accounts.  All of them.  So I told him about BANS since I think the program is well worth the one time $97 fee.  Even if you didn’t want to sell anything through the site, you could pay much more than that for a website template.  You’d probably get something more out of the box and ready to go, but BANS is highly customizable. 

I also told him about Commission Junction and ClickBank.  I think his mind began to boggle at that.  They’re both free to sign up for, and you get a cut of any sales you make for the other companies that you’re promoting.  I don’t think he understands much about affiliate marketing since he kept asking me “and you don’t have to actually have a product, right?”.  I’ll need to talk to him about that a little more.

All in all, I told him that if he started a blog and started pimping products on it, (rather than purchasing BANS or anything else other than domain and hosting) he’d be shelling out $6-17 a month.  And you know?  I never realized just how cheap that is.  Where else can you start a business for under $20 but on the internet?

I built 7 BANS stores over a period of about 2 weeks. Towards the end, I no longer had to follow instructions, I could simply make all the transfers and set it all up on my own.

 Then I went on vacation.  I haven’t even touched my BANS sites in approximately 3 weeks, except to add AdSense to one of them.  Tonight I decided to set one up quick and then work on it tomorrow.  And you know what?  I don’t remember a thing.

This is why it’s so important to keep up on your projects.  Setting up the program is taking me twice as long as usual now, because I have to follow the directions, step by step.  And my CuteFTP free trial ran out, so I had to pay for the full version.  And set that up as well. 

Lo and behold! Mere hours after announcing my affliliate earnings, Squidoo has updated the lens master earnings. I’ve nearly doubled my account balance for a grand total of $10.10 . This may not sound like much to you, but I haven’t updated any of my lenses since January 10th. This month’s earnings are the result of doing virtually no work during the month, whatsoever.

I haven’t been trying to earn affiliate money for long. Aside from sticking AdSense on a handful of personal blogs, and the occasional Amazon link on those blogs’ posts, I’ve really only been actively working on affiliate sites for about a month. And I was away for 1 1/2 weeks of that.Still, during that time I earned a little over $1 on AdSense bringing my total from AdSense to just under $8. I earned a little under $1 on Squidoo, bringing my Squidoo earnings to $5.50 plus $1.83 Amazon commission that hasn’t cleared yet, and a few cents that are being donated to the Grameen Foundation.

For a while, Squidoo was touted as the best promotional tool in the world.  I think we all know that there is no such thing, but just because something doesn’t live up to the hype doesn’t make it worthless.  In fact, there are a lot of great reasons to build a lens at Squidoo. (Why, yes, that is a referral link.  I do appreciate any join ups.)

1. You actually can make money with Squidoo.

Believe it or not, I didn’t know that when I joined up with Squidoo.  The first lens I built had me so befuddled, I gave up half way through and let it go.  A few months later I decided to give it another shot and, lo and behold, my unfinished lens had earned me money!  I believe it was something like $0.37, but it wasn’t nothing, and it encouraged me to push through and finish not only that lens, but a dozen more.

You can earn money through direct sales (your own product), affiliate sales (someone else’s product- in fact, Squidoo offers sales modules for many different companies that you can use), and clicks on ads.  Squidoo sets up AdSense and other affiliate links on all lenses, and they share 50% of the profits on these with all lens masters.  So even if your lens isn’t successful on its own, you’ll still get a cut.

2. Low payout threshold.

This is related to #1 (above), but you can set your own pay out threshold as low as $1.  I have mine set to $10, but you can set it as high or low as you want to.  You can even have the income donated for you.  Just select one or more of the dozens of charities and causes Squidoo provides and put in the percentage you want donated.  You can mix and match across the board, or on individual lenses.  For example, on lenses that are automatically compiled by Squidoo (rather than hand built by me), I have 50% donated to the Grameen Foundation, and the other 50% sent to my account.

3. Draw traffic to your other sites.

For some reason, Squidoo lenses tend to rank high in search engines.  If you build your lens well enough, a visitor may be interested enough in what you have to say to follow a link to whichever site you wish to promote.  If you have a blog, even better as you can insert a RSS feed directly into your lens.

 4. Raise your Page Rank with links.

As I said, lenses tend to rank well in search engines which gives them a good bit of authority.  Insert one or two well chosen links into a popular lens, and you’ve instantly given yourself more authority on whichever site you chose to promote.

5.  It’s completely free.

While you can pay someone to build a lens for you, or buy one pre-built, building a lens is easy and the options are continually growing.  The only thing that you risk is your time.

6. There’s a referral program.

While Squidoo is totally free, they do offer a referral program.  For every person you refer, you earn $5 after they earn their first $15.  For some lens masters, this will never happen.  For others, it could be in their first week.

Once you’ve finished your first lens, take a look at my post on ranking high on Squidoo.

I’d love to say that I decided to follow in the footsteps of John Chow and Darren Rowse, but while I’d love to make that kind of money from this blog, that’s not really why I’m starting it.

For years my main career focus was to become a professional novelist.  Since I don’t seem to need as much money as many others seem to need, I wasn’t too concerned about becoming a best seller, just enough to cover the basics would be enough.

 I spent a lot of time online learning about the writing craft.  One day I stumbled upon a community blog that was comprised mostly of writers.  About half of these writers were freelancers, not novelists, and I inadvertantly began to learn about the freelance writing world.  Eventually I decided that being a freelance writer by day and a novelist by night would be even better than just a novelist since the income would be more predictable.

A few months later that community site folded, and many of us started up our on blogs on Blogger and WordPress.  Many of the same freelancers and novelists that I’d been in touch with at the community site continued to stay in touch through our personal blogs, and I began to learn even more.  Eventually I put a few things together.

Freelance web content writers write web content for internet marketers.  While many of these marketers have physical or informational products to sell, many of them were affiliate marketers.  And more, many of these affiliate sites were built with little more than a site template and some Adsense!  Granted, I don’t know much about marketing or HTML, but I do know how to use WordPress, and if I was going to be writing content…. maybe it should be for more than a one time $5-15 payment. 

 And so I began subscribing to professional bloggers and marketers RSS feeds and started learning more about affiliate marketing, programs, etc.  However, since all of my focus was on the affiliate sites I was building, I noticed that my writing blog had become more of a “look what I did today!” kind of blog.  Readership started to dwindle as most of my readers were there to hear about my writing or personal life.  I started feeling guilty when I blogged because I knew it wasn’t what my friends were interested in hearing.  And yet I wanted to talk about this.  Plus, I totally went on a domain registering binge.  I can’t seem to help myself.

So this is the beginner’s blog.  Hopefully to become a professional one day, but for now, it’s my platform to shout about what worked, what didn’t, what I’m trying, and what’s new.  Maybe some day I’ll be the new Darren or John (I don’t think my husband would like me getting a sex change, but I’m sure he’d enjoy the pay checks), but for now- I’ll just be The Nicher.

P.S. I haven’t begun optimizing this blog.  Partly because I tend to get involved in more projects than I can handle, but also because I don’t want to begin truly promoting this site until I have something useful to say.