Affiliate Marketing Profit Tools

This little mini-guide is designed to help out those of you who might be struggling to figure out how you’ll be able to deal with the upcoming holidays financially. Times are tight for everyone, so I thought it might be helpful to finally put this out there for those of you who need it.

Now I’ll warn you, there’s hard work involved here. And there’s low pay too. If you’re already making good money with your affiliate product promotions and websites then this probably won’t interest you. If however, you’re strapped for cash and could use a few hundred dollars extra between now and Christmas, you might want to give this a try.

This is primarily geared towards Americans too, but I have heard of a few ways people in other countries have made it work for them too.

Step 1: Sign up for an Associated Content account. There’s no cost.

Step 2: Pick a topic to write about. You’ll want to pick topics which are fairly popular, so do a bit of niche research here. In fact, for the purposes of this project you’ll want to actually get a list of keywords to write articles around, just like you would if you were creating a general bum marketing or website marketing campaign.

Step 3: Write articles around each of your keywords or keyword phrases. Your best bet is to write a minimum of 10 articles each weekday for the next three weeks. I’ll explain why in just a minute.

Step 4: Submit your articles to AC each day, and choose these options:

– NOT published elsewhere yet
– NON exclusive rights
– NO partner distribution
– UPFRONT Payment

You need to submit articles to AC first if you want to be paid for them. If they exist anywhere else online already you can’t qualify for upfront payment.

Do this each and every day for at least three weeks and you’ll have submitted 150 articles. Keep reading to see how this likely make you $300 or more before Christmas…

Associated Content is alot like EZineArticles. They have thousands of writers creating content for them on a daily basis. The main difference though, is that they’ll pay you real money to submit your content to them. There’s a few tips and tricks to know about though…

First and foremost: The pay sucks. They advertise payments of up to $20 per article, but the average for most people appears to be more like $3-$5 instead. And they will not pay for 100% of your articles.

When you submit your articles for an upfront payment, it goes into the review queue. It seems to take anywhere from 3-7 days to be reviewed and receive a payment offer. Depending on the quality, topic, and type of articles you submit, some of them may be denied advanced payments. You’ll still have the opportunity to make money from them and I’ll discuss that in a moment.

Those articles which are good enough to warrant advanced payments will receive an “offer” which tells you how much AC is willing to pay you for it. You then need to accept or reject that offer. All offers accepted generally get paid within just a few days, directly to your PayPal account.

One mildly annoying feature is that they do not batch payments together into one. If you’ve received and accepted 10 payment offers, you will get 10 seperate payments to your PayPal. It can add up though

To improve your chances of getting payment offers on each article, be sure to write a minimum of 400-500 words per article. Be sure to write on a narrow, useful, and popular topic too. If your article is too broad it can be rejected, and if there is not enough interest in the topic it can also be rejected. This can be frustrating in the beginning but it doesn’t take long to get the hang of what they’re looking for.

If you write on a news related topic you must cite sources too, or they’ll reject those articles.

Once you’ve accepted an offer, you’ll go into the payment queue. AC seems to pay every Monday, Wednesday and Friday so it doesn’t take long at all to get the cash in hand.

Now, if you happen to get a full 10 articles accepted each and every weekday for the next three weeks you’ll receive 150 individual payments from AC. If you’ve gotten $3 per article, that’s a cool $350 extra in your PayPal account by Christmas. If you get $5 per article then you’re looking at a solid $750.

As I said earlier though, I’ve never heard of anyone getting upfront payment offers on 100% of their articles. So factor the rejection rate into things as early as you can. If you can get offers on 90% of what you submit then you’ll still have received payment on 135 articles.

Now, this is a crappy, labor intensive way to make money. But it’s excellent and fast for anyone that needs it. I suggest you take it to the next level though.

Remember how you chose the publishing options for each article submitted? You let AC publish the articles first BUT you chose the Non Exclusive option. This means you can now go through and use all 150 articles in other places.

- Publish them to EZineArticles to promote your websites or affiliate products
- Publish them to your own websites running AdSense, affiliate promotions, and other money making techniques.
- Create autoresponders out of them
- Put them together into ebooks, reports, and so on that you give away or sell

I suggest using ZipPoster to load up all 150+ articles onto your website at once, then letting your website be drip fed for months to come.

So what do you do with the articles which get denied for upfront payment? Well here you have several options too:

1. You can still publish it at AC and earn a little bit of money from the traffic it gets. AC has a “performance payments” system which allows you to continue earning money on your published content each and every month. At the moment I believe the pay is $1.50 for every 1000 views.

2. You can delete those rejected articles from AC and use them as exclusive content on your own websites.

3. You can use the articles at EZA, on blogs, at Squidoo, and all the various other publishing places online. Attach your bio box to promote your website or affiliate products, and they’ll passively earn you traffic and perhaps sales for years to come.

So: Get tons of content written, submit it to AC to earn some quick Christmas cash, then repurpose the hell out of it for many other ongoing income projects!

- Kathy

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Tips & Techniques, Tools & Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.