This is a guest post by Marc Kantoori from OnlineMoneyTip.com who talks about some of his beginning experiences and successes in affiliate marketing.

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Until 6 months ago I never tried anything with affiliate marketing; I was happy designing websites and optimizing Adwords campaigns for my clients. Of course I read stories about marketers making tens of thousands per month, but I didn’t really believe those stories. Most looked like ego maniacs, ready to make a quick profit selling bad quality ‘Make Money Easy’ guides.

But then a ‘nuisance’ called RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) came along and made me think harder about earning more money with less work. Of all the affiliate examples I had seen, one in particular had made me think: “Hey, could this work? It looks so simple. Almost too simple”.

I investigated it some more and found out that the main keywords involved were actually quite cheap. The lowest bid was $0.10 for position 2-3. So I designed a landing page and set up a campaign in Google Adwords. I was getting a lot of clicks and even a nice percentage of conversions, but after a month it turned out to be a ROI (Return On Investment) of 1:1 ($1 income for every $1 advertising costs). So, I gave up with this campaign. Too early, as turned out. More about that later.

Direct linking attempts, does it work?

Then I started trying out direct linking to several offers, as this can be set up very easily often you can have a new campaign running within minutes. To be short: direct linking sucks! The only direct linking campaign that returned a profit was through promoting Amazon products. But it costs way too much time to research and select the right Amazon products to promote and the monthly profits were in the range of $100-200.

What makes it difficult with Amazon is that there is a load of competition. But the main problem is: you do not get a ‘cookie’ as an Amazon affiliate. This means that if the person who clicked on your affiliate link buys the Amazon product immediately, you get paid your commission. But when that same person, after clicking on your link, buys during a new browser session that day or a day after, you do not get paid a dime! Gone investment!

In the end only Amazon really profits … so I ditched Amazon too.

Anyone with better experiences with or tips on how to promote Amazon is welcome to send me an update !

Don’t give up too easily!

This was the lesson to be learned. After another 2 months of researching affiliate offers and reading affiliate blogs and forums, I had gotten a few other ideas about ways to set up a campaign. So I decided to go back to my previously described campaign that gave me a ROI of 1:1. But now I did some things differently:

• I used Yahoo Search Marketing instead of Google Adwords
• I stripped the landing page to its bare essence
• I used ’standard match’ with keyword bidding (same as ‘exact’ match in Adwords)
• I turned to the european market instead of the US (less competition, I started with Italy)
• I used 20-30 of the most common misspellings of the main product name and functions (because of Trademark issues in Europe)

After these changes to my old campaign, I started getting new and better results:

• my CTR skyrocketed to around 20-30%
• my conversion rate became a steady 15%
• my ROI went to 1:10 (instead of 1:1)

Totally different results than with my previous approach. Instead of getting 1 dollar for every dollar spent, I suddenly got 10 dollars for every dollar spent. Whoohaaa! Finally I had a campaign that was working as a real ‘money train’. I then started to upscale this campaign to other products from this merchant and started advertising in other European countries. After 4 months of upscaling, this one campaign was generating $20-30,000 per month with an investment of 10% of that amount.

Marc Kantoori