I’m writing this post to give those not familiar with how easy affiliate marketing can be, a quick example of how I pulled in over $1400 in profits in three weeks during the Christmas season - spending literally 20 minutes setting everything up.

One of the best sources for finding “hot” products to market is Google Trends.  If you’re not familiar with this, it is basically a daily listing of the most searched terms on Google.

While perusing Google Trends in early December, I noticed a term way down on the list that I had never heard of before.  This term was “kindle”.  I clicked on that term on discovered it was Amazon’s new wireless reading device.  This particular device allows you to download thousands of digital books from Amazon, stores them, and allows you to read them on the Kindle tablet screen.  It’s actually an awesome product!

After a few more days, I noticed that the term “kindle” was moving up the Google Trends rankings.  So I decided that I needed to take a closer look at this product.  Maybe I could make a few bucks on it.

Logging in to my Amazon affiliate account, I learned that the Amazon Kindle was priced at $399.99 and that Amazon was offering a 10% commission to affiliates that referred customers.  This was simply an awesome commission - almost $40 per sale!  The only catch was, Amazon was out of stock on the Kindle and although a customer could order one, they would have to wait until after Christmas to receive it.  So I had to deal with a little bit of a snag.

So here’s what I did:

1.  I decided to direct link and use Google Adwords to drive traffic to the offer.

2.  I spent $3 purchasing the domain name www.preorder-wireless-reader.info and redirected it to the offer with my affiliate link.  Why do this instead of just direct linking to the offer?  Well, I did direct link to the offer in the Adwords destination url.  But, I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose any sales if someone didn’t click on the ad and instead typed in my domain name into their address bar.  To accomplish this I simply paid $3 for the .info domain and redirected it in my domain manager to my Amazon affiliate link and simply placed my .info domain in the Adwords display url.

3.  Next, I set up my Google PPC Ad.  Remember that the Kindle was (and still is) sold out, so I wanted to get people to preorder it even though they wouldn’t receive until after the holidays.  Remember the domain name I chose?  “Preorder-wireless-reader”?  In a small sense, I wanted people to think that they might receive it sooner if they ordered through my domain.  So in my ad, I said something to the effect of “Preorder Your Kindle Wireless Reader Before Christmas!”

The results?

I spent $680 on that ad over a three week period ending on December 28th.  I sold 47 Amazon Kindles giving me revenue of about $1800.  Additionally, these customers ordered other things under my affiliate link as well amounting to another $300 in commissions!

So let’s recap:

10 minutes researching a hot product

10 minutes setting up a domain and PPC ad.

1 minute per day monitoring your progress.

And thats it!  Over $1400 profit.  Does it get any easier than this?

Have a profitable day!!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under ONLINE MARKETING, AFFILIATE MARKETING. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.