How I Got Into Affiliate Marketing
My introduction to affiliate marketing came about seven years ago, around March 1998. That was when I ran into a web site that had a simple banner promoting a new computer program called the Internet Call Manager. When running the Internet Call Manager software you would be notified of telephone calls made to your phone line that was being used to surf the Internet. I thought it sounded like a pretty good idea, though I didn’t have any use for it as I had a second phone line that I used to connect to the Internet. However I did notice that for every new customer you referred to their service they would pay you $5.00. Being young and having too much time on my hands I signed up for their affiliate program as it sounded like pretty easy money. A few days later I built a very basic web page with certain Internet Call Manager realted keywords repeated pretty often. I figured that people would probably search for these keywords (like Internet Call Waiting, Internet Caller ID, etc.) and I wanted my web page to be the first result on the search engines.
In September I got my first cheque from the Internet Call Manager, a whopping $80.00. I had signed up 16 people or about two new customers a month. I was thrilled with the easily gotten money. Then three months later I got another cheque, this time for $130.00. Incredible! From that point on the cheques started coming in like clockwork, once a month for more and more each time. Amazingly I was making this money without having made a single change to the web page since I had created it over a year earlier. In fact, in 1999 I made over a thousand dollars promoting the Internet Call Manager with just one simple web page. This was my first taste of affiliate marketing and it showed me what one was capable of earning without too much effort. I liked it.
I kept getting cheques over the next few years from the Internet Call Manager (in fact I am still getting them every few months with that 1998 web page still performing very well) and was introduced to Commission Junction and Amazon.com’s Associate Program in 2001. It was then that I spread out into many new affiliate programs, selling everything from books to high speed Internet subscriptions to software to ink cartridges to hockey jerseys to loans. There was absolutely no cost to try promoting a new affiliate program (indeed even all my web pages were hosted on free servers and used free domains) so I tried my luck with all sorts of stuff. Some paid off, most didn’t, but every once in a while I would get lucky and find an incredibly high paying niche.
As of 2005 I’ve received about 500 cheques from affiliate marketing activities. It’s gotten a lot more difficult than it used to be with datafeeds, adsense scraper sites, page hijacking, spyware, and such but it’s still paying really well. How did you start in affiliate marketing? Leave a comment below and share your story.