Newbie Guide
Disclaimer: This industry is NOT for everyone. Some people are simply too stupid or lack the skills or drive necessary to succeed. Don’t quit your dayjob until you’re consistently making at least twice your salary with your online efforts. Internet marketing is a very volatile industry and you can go from making $3000 per day on a campaign to $0, overnight, with no hope of recovering it.
The most frequent request Nickycakes gets is to help someone get started making money online. The truth of the matter is, there are so many ways to get into Internet Marketing that it’s hard to tell an individual what is going to work best for them. Nickycakes could share exactly how he makes all his money online, but this wouldn’t be good for anyone. Possessing the drive to test different money making ideas online until you find one that makes good money, and repeating, is what separates the men from the boys in this industry, and spoonfeeding people exact details on how to make money will only end up hurting more than it helps. If you ask Nickycakes for fish, he’d rather give you a fishing pole and teach you how to use it than bring you a bucket of perch.
Many times people will ask specific questions that have already been covered thoroughly on this site. Therefore, Nicky will list a few helpful posts that may benefit someone getting started, or just looking for more info:
Facebook Ads - This topic has been played out to death on this blog because it is probably the easiest way for a newb to get his/her feet wet and start making some cash while learning how PPC and Affiliate Marketing works. Here are some posts with information that is still relevant today as it was when it was posted.
Gaming Facebook Ads Part 1
Gaming Facebook Ads Part 2
5 Killer Tips for Facebook Ad Ownage
Still Can’t Make Money With Facebook Ads?
Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing - This ties in a little with Facebook Ads since that’s actually one form of PPC Marketing. The more popular PPC platforms are Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), and Microsoft Adcenter. The learning curve is a little unforgiving for these, and for this reason, it’s recommended that you get some instruction before diving in head first if you don’t want to risk losing a lot of money unnecessarily. You would do well to read forums like WickedFire where most of the big time PPC guys hang out. Don’t waste your time buying any e-books, ever. The only paid service for learning PPC Nickycakes has found to be of any use is PPC Coach, run by a wickedfire forum member. The Cakes did a writeup about this service here:
PPC Coach Review
Affiliate Marketing - Affiliate marketing is nothing more than being paid commissions by a company for promoting their products. Many companies would rather you risk your money on advertising, and in return are willing to pay you for leads/sales/signups/email addresses/whatever. When Nickycakes has to explain what he does to friends and family members, he usually uses an analogy. Imagine you cut a deal with coke where they are willing to pay you $1 for every case of soda you sell for them. You put up some ads around town, and for every customer who buys a case that was referred by you, they pay you $1. Pretty simple.
Affiliate Marketing is usually lumped in with PPC because a good number of Affiliate Marketers use PPC ads to promote affiliate offers.
The best way to get started in Affiliate Marketing is to sign up with an Affiliate Network. Affiliate Networks act as middlemen between you and merchants, providing the commission tracking and relationship with them, so you don’t have to. Most of these networks have relationships with thousands of merchants on the web, allowing you to pick and choose what products you want to advertise.
To get you going, Nickycakes recommends these two Affiliate Networks due to the quality of their tracking, the quality of their offers, and the general helpfulness and availability of the Account Managers (the person you will be personally dealing with on a day to day basis at the network):
If you apply and want to be approved quickly, feel free to contact Nickycakes to help get the ball rolling. The networks have a pretty strict approval process for new affiliates because they guarantee the merchants that they will try to keep as many scammers away from their offers as possible.
Staying In Touch - It’s so frustrating to get into this industry and have nobody to consult with. If Nickycakes didn’t make a few friends when he got started that he could bounce ideas off of, he probably would have given up out of boredom rather quickly. For this reason it’s recommended that you try to make some contacts. Nicky has made an IRC chat room which, at the time of writing this, generally has over 60 active people. It is located on the freenode network (irc.freenode.net) in the channel #cakes. More info can be found here: Cakes Chat.
That’s It For Now - Nickycakes will hopefully add more to this guide as he has more ideas for appropriate topics. For now, the best advice to give to someone new to Internet Marketing is something that Nickycakes wasted months not following: Just do something. Seriously. Quit reading so much crap online, quit reading so many forums and blogs, and go build some sites and try some stuff. That’s the only way you’ll ever make any real money online, and will bring you more valuable experience than reading thousands of blogs will ever bring you.
Keep it real.
