Money for nothing, accidental affiliate income.

A few years ago I set up a blog to document my stock trading forays, primarily for my own record keeping but also to let others follow along and perhaps learn something as well. While it was not wildly popular (it was stock trading after all) I did get to see people from all over the world read and sometimes comment on my posts, and that was cool. I have put that project on hold for now though.

So what does this have to do with internet affiliate marketing?

While not much on the surface, it did serve to introduce me to two important facets of the internet marketing world... unintentionally.

The first was that it provided a familiarity with search engine operations (or optimization if you like SEO, of course at the time I knew nothing of this) and a certain level of keyword usage and how it tied in to my blogging and content. Most of this was due to me tracking my stats and playing with what gained more attention and where that attention was pointed within my blog posts. I would specifically not use words and phrases that I knew were popular among people interested in trading and, the odd time, I would put some in to see what happened. Interesting results.

The second was the power of affiliate marketing over other forms of "easy" blog monetization. I had put the context driven adsense banners onto my blog and saw very little in the line of results. I checked my account last week and there was about $23 accrued... for over two years of adsense banner use and many thousands of visitors.

Somewhere along the line I received an invitation from my broker to join their affiliate program due to their noticing some of my blog posts mentioning them in a favourable light. Obviously I used enough keywords related to their interests for them to find me. So I signed up. I figured it couldn't hurt and, if nothing else, it might prove to be an interesting experiment. I put their banner on my blog and mentioned them in a few posts... which was nothing more than I had already been doing anyway. Now I receive between $30 and $100 a month in commission cheques. I think that is as close as I can get to real money for nothing.

A note worth mentioning on the commissions from my broker.

These are not paid for one time signups but are commissions based on the trading activity of the clients that signed up through my link for as long as they are active clients. The best income is of this sort, recurring. My real business revolves around regular monthly paid services and clients that use the services for many years. Some have been active for literally decades now and that is a client base well worth cultivating. Not many can claim to have been paid by the same clients month after month for over 30 years. Oh, it's a family business, I have not been active in it for quite that long, but close.

Jeff.