For every person I've talked to that is successful at all with affiliate marketing, there are probably nine others that are either in the red or failing. I know, not just from talking to people, but from my own personal experience that it's likely you'll fail your first couple of times around in the Affiliate Marketing game. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule and there will be those that inevitably take to the business like a fish to water, but this article isn't for those people.

The intention here is to save people before they throw up a white flag and go back to their jobs with their heads hung low.

First and foremost, let's get one myth out of the way: you will not get rich quick with affiliate marketing. In most cases, it is either supplemental to or a replacement for a regular job. Yes, you might make more money doing it and you'll have more freedom doing so, but it's a long, arduous journey to actually call yourself 'rich.' When I started affiliate marketing, my initial goal was (besides making a single sale) to generate a steady $100/day. It took me 5 months working 14+ hour days to reach that goal. That is by no means rich and by no means quick; it's actually quite slow but at least I was turning a small profit from it. I was spending about $50+/day at the time which seems trivial now, but at the time, seemed like a ton. It wasn't easy to keep pushing forward. In fact, at one point, I was failing so bad and spending $150+/day to the point where I just abruptly stopped and let everything stabilize. It was scary.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

When setting your max bid price on ad networks like Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or Microsoft AdCenter, it's best to know how much you're getting in return (profit) before you settle on a number. If you bid too high, you might get more sales but still be in the red. If you bid too low, you might make an okay profit but less conversions. The trick is to find just the right number and that takes time and finesse but here's a quick way to determine what your max bid should be.

In general, the formula I use for determining max bid is basically this:

((ecpc * (1 - bounce rate)) - 0.01)

So if your ecpc is $0.75 and your bounce rate is 40%, that means you really generate $0.45 ecpc. Subtract $0.01 from that ($0.44 ecpc) and you'll have a very safe maximum to set your keyword bids at. Read More »

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Recently, I created a post on Digital Point Forums in order to help those that are either new to Azoogle or those that are frustrated and need a little guidance to make their first dollar. In general, people seem to be having a lot of difficulty getting their campaigns off the ground, so I thought I'd help anyone with this problem out and give them a little push in the right direction.

• Choosing Offers
• Landing Pages
• Mailing Lists
• Advertising
• Funding
• Conclusion

First off, you should register with AzoogleAds if you haven't already. Next, you should get very familiar with the interface. Once you've checked both these things off your list, it's time to choose your offer(s).

Choosing Offers

Choosing the right product is probably the second hardest part of affiliate marketing, next to advertising. There's definitely no right answer when it comes to choosing products, and in general, I like to test every product I come across. Honestly, that's the best way to determine which products actually work for you to sell. Just think, if you could test every product you saw, you might find just 5 that convert profitably and you'd already be in business.

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When it comes to the art of Affiliate Marketing, many people are lost when they encounter what seems like a vast array of confusion. Our goal at the AffToolbox is to remove that illusion of confusion and focus on the key points to a successful affiliate marketing campaign for any product you throw up. A huge part of that success is tracking.

Tracking allows you to know which search engine brought you a sale, which keyword triggered the ad that led to the sale and which ad led to the click that gave you the sale. It's really that simple. Of course, additional information can be tacked on but for the purposes of this how-to, I'm going to show you how to track the following: search engine, specific ad and specific keyword.

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Popularity: 14% [?]