If you think $100,000 a year is a magical target to aim for, you may want to raise your sights after reading this.
Here’s a guy who made $1 million in affiliate program commissions last year.
After experimenting with various ventures online, Jeremy Palmer discovered affiliate programs in 2003 while working for a small financial services company.
Jeremy, who’s 27, noticed that some of the company’s affiliates were earning thousands of dollars in commissions.
So he added some affiliate links to a website he owned. He says the commissions he generated encouraged him to build more affiliate sites in other industries.
He was a remarkably quick learner.
“Within two months I was making more money from my affiliate websites than I was at my day job,” he says. “Within six months I was making twice as much, so I decided to quit my day job and focus exclusively on my affiliate business.”
In his first year as an affiliate, he earned $100,000 from his websites. “During my second year as an affiliate I made over $1 million.”
In two years, he has created more than 100 affiliate sites.
He shows you a couple of them in his book.
Late last year, he won Commission Junction’s Horizon Award for Innovation.
“…Jeremy has become one of the most productive, compliant, and responsive publishers in the Commission Junction network…” CJ says.
In his just published first ebook, High Performance Marketing, Jeremy describes how he does it.
For me, the book was a pleasant surprise. I asked Jeremy what sort of reactions he’s getting to his book.
“The feedback and response I’ve received is amazing! It has really blown away my expectations. I had no idea there was this kind of demand for affiliate training and learning. “I’ve been an affiliate since late 2003, and I think sometimes I take my experience and knowledge for granted. Sharing this information with other affiliates has really opened my eyes to the need for affiliate marketing education.”
He says his refund rate is in the single digits. “In fact, I had sold well over 100 copies before I had my first refund request. Based on my understanding this is exceptionally low for an e- product.”
There is a lot of added value in the free member support forum. If you have a question that is not answered in the book, simply post it in the support forum, and either Jeremy or another affiliate will answer it.
Jeremy doesn’t try to sell you expensive tools or software. Most of the tools and resources he recommends don’t cost anything.
AdSense can dilute your affiliate offers
Bucking recent trends, he doesn’t give any AdSense tips. He’s so good at earning affiliate commissions that he finds he can make more from affiliate commissions than AdSense.
“I don’t mix Google AdSense in with my affiliate offers. My websites are highly optimized for one action – generating affiliate commissions. When you have AdSense on your pages it can dilute your affiliate offers.”
If you don’t understand something in the book, you can post a question in his private forum.
The book is very reasonably priced and comes with free updates.
Jeremy doesn’t waste words. The ebook is written in a no-fluff, no-nonsense style.
In 140 pages, he takes you through the whole process – including how he does keyword research, selects products to promote, designs and creates a website, and gets traffic to it.
If you’ve been doing affiliate marketing for a while, you could quickly skim through the book and decide that you already know most of it.
So what makes the million-dollar affiliate different from most of us?
There are little clues all the way through the book.
For example, Jeremy explains how he selects the best merchants to promote, and how he identifies best converting products.
He explains some of the different types of sites affiliates can build. You may have overlooked important options.
He describes in detail how to write web content that will make your visitor click through and buy. He shows you an example of an effective landing page and explains why it attracts sales.
He’s so good at creating effective landing pages that – unlike many affiliates – he can make a profit from buying advertising to send traffic to his sites. (He also uses organic search methods.)
He tells you where he buys his advertising and why. He also shows you how he tracks the results to find out what’s working and what isn’t. He also shows you how to write effective ads.
He devotes a large section to keyword research.
“One of the biggest factors that has contributed to my success as an affiliate is keyword research,” he says.
I was shocked to see that his favorite keyword research tools don’t cost anything. When I questioned him about this, he explained that he supplements his results by using Wordtracker.
That’s a relief. The Yahoo keyword tool can give you very misleading results. For example, it treats “wool rug” and “rug wool” as though they’re the same. Wordtracker and other keyword research tools provide more useful results.
Keyword Buying Cycle
He describes what he calls the “Keyword Buying Cycle”. You need to know this if you want to attract website visitors who are ready to buy.
This is hugely important.
If affiliate marketing isn’t quite “clicking” for you, I strongly recommend you study this section carefully.
It’s an absolute must-have for every affiliate, especially when you consider that when you get the book you also get access to Jeremy’s private forum where you can ask him questions.
You get to ask the million-dollar affiliate questions for the price of the book (it’s modestly priced). You also see all the other questions he’s answered. That alone is a fantastic bargain.
It’s insights like these that help make Jeremy a million-dollar affiliate.
A million-dollar affiliate. It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
[UPDATE: Jeremy has stopped selling his ebook.]