Affiliate marketing first caught my eye back during the summer of 2005. Reading about driving traffic to websites for pennies on the dollar, I thought how hard can this be?? You know those ebooks that make it sound so easy … or maybe you don’t 
My first campaign
Anyways, so I went over to clickbank to find a good product. (That was the only place I knew at the time, or so those ebooks told me). The first product I chose was Auto Lawn Sprinklers. Since it was the summer, I thought it was a good idea. (You can still promote this by the way, owner is a decent guy from what I remember).
After reading Perry Marshall’s adwords book, I gathered about 100 keywords, stuck them into some adgroups and turned it on. The impressions were coming but the CTR was abysmal, I think around 1%. I remember I thought I was a genius when I started placing question marks in my ad titles. This boosted my CTR to around 3-4% … I considered writing an ebook on that 1 trick alone but said “nah I’ll wait till I get some sales under my belt”
Not much luck
I made a handful of sales, but it was a slow bleed. I didn’t know about tracking or managing bids so I just stopped the campaign, one of my top 5 affiliate mistakes - not tracking. Anyways the rest of 2005 and 2006 I dabbled off and on promoting random clickbank products. Nothing really successful, but didn’t lose too much either. I couldn’t devote much time to affiliate marketing during these 2 years because I was finishing grad school, living in China, and preparing for my wedding in the fall of 2006.
My first Profitable campaign
In late 2006, I was now married, graduated, and living back in the good ole’ USA. I held off finding a job for the sole purpose of trying to earn a living from home. Affiliate marketing was actually a side project of mine, I was really wanting to trade the markets for a living.
How I got my first profits was really an epiphany. I had moved away from clickbank and was promoting more retail type products. This was new for me, so instead of bidding on the obvious core keywords I was bidding on their typos and phonetic misspellings. These clicks were extremely cheap .07-.08 a click. You can check out my keyword typo tool under the toolbox tab.
Paydirt!
1 keyword in particular was getting a nice return. I remember logging into my account 1 day, seeing $320 in commissions having only spent about $15! How’s that for a nice ROI?! This opened my eyes and I have been now doing it full-time for over 1 year. BTW, I still have that 1 keyword running, it’s not as cheap anymore because competitors have moved in, but it is still profitable.
It wasn’t until I moved away from clickbank and started developing my own landing pages that I began to see a good return in my pay per click campaigns.
After this, I began to join more affiliate programs, and test more offers. I currently have around 15 campaigns running, and now it seems it’s only a matter of testing around until you find something that works. You will lose money though, as risk is part of the game. Take it slow in the beginning, if you’re just starting out, don’t try to upload 10k keywords and let it loose in one shot, you’ll most likely quit in frustration. Build your campaigns out over time …
I hope this encourages you guys, just wanted to share my little story with you
Thanks for your sharing, i really appreciate.