We Love Making Money While We Sleep

OK, I’ve heard the hype that affiliate marketing can make you money while you sleep. Well it’s true!!! I woke up this sunny Saturday morning, turned on my laptop and lo and behold, there was an email from one of our affiliate programs saying that we made $50 overnight. I called my sister and fellow Extreme Newbie with the news. We couldn’t believe that we made our first money while we slept.Wooo Hoooo!!!!!

Now you may be thinking that $50 isn’t much. But guess what. If we made $50 last night while we slept, ya think we can do it again? We flat out know we can through affiliate marketing. But it’s not for the faint of heart.

Getting started in affiliate marketing requires a lot of grunt work – and we’ve been doing it, day in and day out since we started this website and our Internet marketing business. Success is starting to dribble in and one day soon – we know that the dribble will become a flow.

How do we know that? Well what we have here at Extreme Newbies is a little special combo called faith and believing. This combo gets us up each day, keeps us at our computers for hours, has us learning things we never thought we ever want to know let alone become passionate about. There’s a saying we live by now:

Understand to achieve anything requires faith and belief in yourself, vision, hard work, determination and dedication. Remember all things are possible for those who believe. ~ Gail Devers

If you’re thinking that these two Extreme Newbies are overly optimistic – think again! What we are is relentlessly optimistic and more focused now than ever because guess what – we really like making money while we sleep!

How about you?

The Extreme Newbie Buddy System

You don’t have to go into the affiliate marketing business with a partner; although for my sister, Karen and me it has turned out to be the perfect business venture. You will definitely benefit from having a few buddies, throughout the process. Karen and I each bring different talents and skill sets to the table, which works well, especially during the stressful times. Of course, you can do this alone, but our experience has proven that a helping hand here-and-there is a good thing.

Our greatest business asset, outside of each other, was our decision to share the learning curves in this experience with two other newbies. We began with a weekly, one-hour conference call to learn each stop of the process together, sharing tips, resources and lessons learned. We chose to use Affilo Blueprint 2.0 as our primary training tool, so each week we had tasks to complete, which kept us moving forward.

Along the way, each member of our team found resources and information to share that enhanced our learning experience. Together we’ve made these recent newbie discoveries we want to share with you:

You can build your own affiliate website or hire a contractor to do the work or purchase a pre-built website.

• If you buy a pre-built website, your purchase generally includes the domain name, a number of articles about your niche, an opt-in box and products to monetize the site.

• Buyer Beware: Find out if the seller will take care of replacing the their affiliate links with yours, i.e., your Click Bank name, so that subsequent sales from visitors to the site are properly credited to you. You don’t want to buy a website that’s set up to pay someone else. Many sellers will also take care of minimal installation of the site, for a small additional fee; some will even coach you through establishing your first affiliate marketing site. Just figure out exactly what you’re getting.

You can write your own content, hire a freelance writer online or purchase private label rights (PLR) articles that target your specific niche/topic.

• PLR content is written by someone and available for fee or free for you to edit, rewrite and claim as your own. We recommend changing the title and make word changes and text edits. Some PLR vendors require that you change an article by 30% or more.  Be sure to check the list of rights you get with a PLR purchase and always do spell and grammar checks before you publish.

Continue to grow your buddy list as needed. The goal of building a network of relationships is to help you sustain and grow your affiliate marketing business, whether it consists of one site or a hundred. Some good ways to network include:

• Join a group like Warriors Forum. It’s an amazing place to get quick answers to questions, referrals for various resources to help you build your business and those must-have tips and tricks.

• Learn about the tools and resources you need to maintain and market your site. Take the time to learn how to use these tools. Your learning curve will lead to profits down the road.

The point is that just like building a house, you don’t have to do everything yourself. This is the true key to your ultimate success. So hang in there, Extreme Newbies. There’s light – and income – at the end of the tunnel.

Advice on Making Money

This is a great video on how to overcome the fear of taking the plunge to learn how to make money online as an affiliate marketer. If multimillionaire Ephren Taylor can start his own business at 12 years old, what’s stopping you?

Thirty Day Challenge – What Every Affiliate Newbie Needs

If you want to learn affiliate marketing or any kind of Internet marketing for that matter, there’s an amazing resource out there for you right now! It’s veteran Internet marketer Ed Dales’s little darling – the Thirty Day Challenge. It’s a comprehensive 30 day video training program on the basics of marketing on the web.

Offered only once a year, this great program (we’re taking it) started on August 1st. Now you may be thinking that you’re too late to join in. Not. You can pick up where the program is now and play catch-up as you go along to the end of the month. Or start watching the “30DC” videos on YouTube and go along at your pace.

Whatever you do, jump on this opportunity. Ed and team have done a phenomenal job assembling lessons, tools, resources and even motivational tips that every newbie affiliate marketer can benefit from.  Oh – and I forgot to mention that you can subscribe to the videos and transcripts on iTunes. For you iPhone lovers like me – 30DC is available for you phone too!

Wordpress for Affiliate Marketing Newbies

I’ve been blogging for a few years now and have grown to love Wordpress blogs. It’s what my sis and I have chosen to use for our affiliate websites. If the first thought that comes to you is “what’s Wordpress” or “what’s a blog” – then this video is just what you need to come up to speed. It’s about 50 minutes long so put your feet up and listen up.

Hosting For Your Affiliate Website

If you’re getting into affiliate marketing, you’ll end up with a website at some point and want to find a home for it. That’s what “hosting” is in the online world – that place called a server where your website lives. There are a number of website hosting companies with even more features and benefits. How do you select one?

Well here’s a review site to visit, one of many that give you the skinny on hosting sites.  Remember any review site is bound to be someone else’s affiliate site – just so you know. But that’s OK, it’s where you get to see one of the more popular kinds of affiliate websites, something you can have after you pick a niche.

Just a few things you might want to look for:

1. Does the hosting company have a cpanel? That’s what you need for Wordpress which is the platform we are using for our affiliate websites. Look for our post on Wordpress here on Extreme Newbies.
2. What’s the monthly fee – and do you get a break if you pay annually?
3. Something new – is the hosting company eco-friendly? If this is important to you (and shouldn’t it be for all of us), look for green hosting. It’s out there.
4. Do they have 24/7 easily-accessible support? There’s nothing worse than having a problem at 1am and no one’s home at your hosting company.

Affiliate Marketing Newbies – First Month Lessons

We’re at our first month anniversary as newbie affiliate marketers and whew – lots of lessons learned! Here’s a few:

• Pick a niche – something you’re interested in, something lots of other people are interested in and something where there are products to sell. Examples of some of the ones these newbies picked are weight loss, weight training, credit repair and a new favorite life topic – going green.
• Do a keyword search before you do buy a domain or do anything else. Check out the Google Keyword Tool – easy to use and free. Or try out our favorite keyword tool, Market Samurai that has lots of other features to help in any kind of Internet marketing.
• Focus, focus, focus. Create a roadmap for your affiliate marketing journey. This is not a business that you want to meander along in and miss the opportunity to make the mean green.
• Ignore “bright, shiny objects”. As you get involved in affiliate marketing, you will see wonderful things on the learning curve, things I call – bright, shiny objects, the “accessories” of the trade – courses, programs, tools, resources and my favorite – ready-made affiliate websites. Unless you have a trust fund, you can’t get them all so this is where having a business plan comes in real handy to keep you focused.
• Pass on most of the freebies you run into on the Internet – teleseminars, webinars, ebook, special reports. They are there to get you to buy a paid product. Freebies usually tell you the “what” on a topic but never the “how”. And they can really be a time suck. If something really speaks to you though, follow your intuition, go for it and sign up.
• Ask questions – there are any dumb ones or I would have asked all of them already! One thing I’ve found is that experienced affiliate marketers are always ready to share some advice with a newbie.
• Take your mistakes – like the ones I’ve made this month – as absolutely necessary affiliate marketing lessons learned.

Show me a person who has never made a mistake and I’ll show you somebody who has never achieved much. ~ Joan Collins

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