Affiliate Blogging System

There are a number of things you need to have organised in order to implement my affiliate blogging system and two of the key things are

1. web hosting
2. blog software

For web hosting I always use Hostgator - and my recommendation is the Baby package. The hatchling package does not meet the requirements you need to run all the blogs you will create and the Swamp package is really not needed. With the baby package, you will receive 600GB – plenty of space and 6,000GB bandwidth per month, which is plenty.

Their price for web hosting is $9.95 per month if you pay monthly but drops to $7.95 per month if you pay for 3 years. As you are starting off, just go with the $9.95 per month plan until you get some income coming in.

For blog software, there is really no alternative as far as I am concerned, and that is WordPress. One of the good things about Hostgator is that you can use “Fantastico De Luxe” - one of the items in the Hostgator cPanel to manage your WordPress installation. Fantastico gives you an option to automatically install blog software and of course WordPress which is great.

The major affiliate program I use is one which you should all be familiar with is Amazon.

The key reason I use Amazon is:

1. it is known by everybody (or close to)
2. is a big brand
3. has a good name
4. people trust it to buy from
5. it has a massive range of products

… and the biggest and most important thing for me is that it enables you to create tailored RSS feeds with your affiliate id incorporated.

Now if you look at the affiliate markets I talked about in my previous post, you will see a lot of references to electronic equipment.

For the electronics related niches Amazon offer a flat 4% (as of April 2008) but for all other products the fee varies from 4 to 8.5% depending on quantity shipped on a monthly basis – except Amazon Kindle which for the moment is a flat 10% until they build up market share I guess.

Now if you look at the major affiliate markets I talked about being e.g. computers, video cameras, digital cameras etc. a flat 4% on the purchase price of e.g. a Canon PowerShot A720IS 8MP Digital Camera costing $199.95 is $8.

Start selling one of these a day through your blog and with just 30 sales per month, there is $240 which meets my monthly blog target just like that.

Do you see the power of using this affiliate program now?

The whole thing about this system is choosing the best affiliate markets and from there the best affiliate program within that market.

What do I mean by that you say. Well, in order to gain the most income from the affiliate blogging system, there are some basic criteria to follow:

1. People must spend money in the market
2. Must have a wide range of products in the market
3. Must have a wide range of suppliers
4. Items should change regularly

Now think about those statements, what markets satisfy this criteria?

How about:

• Computers
• Digital Cameras
• MP3 Players
• Sporting equipment – e.g. Skis
• Video Cameras
• Video game consoles – think Playstation, Wii etc.
• Wine

Do you see what I mean?

These to me are the best affiliate markets to target as people go online to spend money and are willing to purchase online for these.

Hope this gives you an idea - next post will talk about the primary affiliate program I use to target these affiliate markets.

How much money will I make from implementing the affiliate blogging system is clearly the first question you want to know. Well, as a general rule, with the caveats being depending on the:

1. market you choose
2. affiliate programs you select
3. steps you follow

I would expect you should be earning between $100-$200 per blog per month. OK, this isn’t huge but let’s think about it – we are going to set-up say 5 blogs:

• Domain names = $7*5 = $35 one off costs
• Hosting = $10 for one month
• Time to set-up = lets say 5 hours work at $50 per hour = $250 one off

Income =

• 2 blogs earning $50 per month as this is a new blog
• 1 blog earning $100 per month
• 1 blog earning $150 per month
• 1 blog earning $200 per month

Total = $550 per month

Now do you see the power of this – you can earn $550 per month with ongoing costs of $10 – you can’t complain at that!

So, this is my first post and as you will see if you read the About Me page, I want to take you on a journey on how I make money on the Internet from multiple different non-internet marketing related blogs.

My background has always been computing and I love to study the Internet and how it has changed over the years but more importantly I love training people and helping others from my background as a trainer and starting off in help desk at my work.

This has made me realise that the gift of helping others is something that gives you immense satisfaction and the hearing of a “thank you for your help” gives me a real feeling of warmth. That is why I want to help you start to earn some money online and give you a step-by-step guide to implement my affiliate blogging system.

Over the coming weeks, I will introduce you to my system so hope you enjoy it and let me know your thoughts as I share the steps