I did not give up, I just took an extended break from any kind of Internet Marketing related banter, and  instead got down to some real hands-on learning the hard way project type stuff.

After a very inconsistent 2009/early 2010 I decided to try something new. Gone was my idea to carry on writing articles to promote Clickbank products, I even stopped blogging on my other sites, as well as this one. I just could not get anything to stick at the time, and I found it pretty boring!

I also stopped buying into random IM products/launches, unsubscribed from all the “gurus” mailing lists which did not really help at all, although I did keep a couple of gurus that I found the most helpful. I went back to the drawing board and re-started myself.

Going back to my novice web design background I wanted to try something I’d not done before. I still wanted to sell stuff online, but I wanted it to be genuine real products that had nothing to do with ebooks or anything like that. I heard the conversion rate on physical products was higher anyway.

Data-Fed

Data Feeds were the answer I was looking for..

Boring explanation from Wikipedia coming up…

Data feed is a mechanism for users to receive updated data from data sources. It is commonly used by real-time applications in point-to-point settings as well as on theworld-wide web. The latter is also called Web feed. News feed is a popular form of Web feed. RSS feed makes dissemination of blogs easy. Product feeds play increasingly important role in e-commerce and internet marketing. Data feeds usually requires structured data. At the present time unstructured data, e.g. HTML pages, dominate the Web. As a result, data feeds have the potential to make a bigger impact on the Web in the future.

The good thing about Datafeeds are that I could build my own website around them, I could get back to coding in PHP again, and I could finally sell real products that I had a real interest in. Perfect!

I found a great website that combined datafeeds from CJ, Linkshare, Share-A-Sale and many more, which saved a bunch of time for me. Plus, I could pretty much sell anything I could think of!

In the next few posts I’ll cover everything in more detail, parts might get a bit technical, but it should still be pretty easy to follow along with(I hope).

Just a warning:: In the time off my grammer and spelling have not improved, so don’t expect that to change!;))

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing. Good to be back:-)

Things have been slow over the last couple of weeks, which is making me think that maybe Santa Claus visits on a more regular basis than my Clickbank checks?;) However, not to get too disheartened I continue to be productive and plan other options that I may want to try and test over the next few days.

Some days affiliate marketing is about as frustrating as trying to flush a beach-ball down my toilet! You have a great few days and then nothing for weeks, similar to to the situation a constipated donkey would find itself in.

But as this is a challenge I did not expect it to go easy anyway, so I’ll take everything in step and try to learn as much as I can from it.

With Christmas just around the corner I have been leaning more toward physical products in Commission Junction, and have been researching select products at Plimus too. I’ve been asking around and it does seem that around this time of year down-loadable products do suffer a slow down, with people pushing more for physical products instead.

To get an idea of what people are buying I have been researching using Ebay Pulse, which shows you the most popular searches people are making at Ebay. The other method I’m using is Amazon.com. I visit Amazon and search a category from the drop-down box, then I sort the order by bestselling first.

Using both of these methods I can get good ideas of what hot items people are looking at buying right now. Obviously I can use my Amazon affiliate link to promote the product, but I always look first at cj.com to see if I can get a better commission rate than the 5% I get from Amazon.

I’ll be using more articles and other free promotion ideas to try and make a few sales with the physical products I select.

But for now, back to work.