What’s all this about?

I’ve been trying to learn to play the guitar for over two years now (this may seem irrelevant, but please be patient, it’ll make sense eventually). About a month ago I Googled “best online guitar lesson” because I really wanted to be able to play a zeppelin song I really like, and was having a hard time even getting the first couple of notes right. I got hundreds of links and products and ebooks and lessons and videos etc. etc. etc. and I enthusiastically signed up for several of them. After wasting a lot of money on reviewing several very crappy courses, I picked the one that helped me finally learn how to play a song by ear. Now I can play virtually anything if I hear it once. This lesson is called Jamorama, and it’s quite popular (and cheap too).

Now, when I like a product, I like to tell people about it; maybe it would help them as well. Now, around this time, my wife was getting interested in these “make money from home” ideas. At that time, I was sure that all those were nothing more than scams to rip off internet-unsavvy people of a little money; that “affiliate marketing” ideas only worked for “experienced marketers” who have a lot of money to invest in having content written or in getting traffic from search engines. That none of the products they were selling were worth the time of day.

And then I noticed that Jamorama (which is a product I did really find useful, helpful, great and all the other good things a product should be) had an affiliate program as well. And I figured I could be wrong about “all” the products being useless. So I started to do some research into this affiliate marketing thing.

Needless to say, I again wasted money on useless ebooks, crappy tutorials and completely banal but well marketed software. But I emerged much the wiser. Here’s what I found:

1. None of the affiliate marketers are honest about what they do. And none of the ebooks I read propagate honesty and transparency. Instead everything out there points to one and one thing alone, “pretend to do something when you’re actually doing something else”. For example, “pretend to review a product honestly when you’re actually marketing it”, or “pretend to link to a relevant, legitimate URL when it actually redirects to a flashy sales page”, or “pretend that your article has unique content when it’s actually a copy-paste/reshuffle of content from other places”, or “pretend that you’re selling a data-entry/form-filling work-at-home idea when in reality that’s just an oversimplification and what you’re actually selling is the idea of a much more complex task of becoming affiliates through various affiliate platforms (CJ, CB, etc.)”. See where I’m going here? Everyone out there seems to be using blogs, article directories, social forums, etc. etc. etc. to subtly promote commercial content while pretending that they are not! Half the reviews I read are by people who have never used the products (I have spoken with some of them and would publish one of those conversations here but since it was nice of them to take the time out and give me free info about their business, I decided against it).

2. I found that most affiliate marketers, and ebooks about affiliate marketing advocate promoting products that pay well, sell the most, belong to a low-competition niche, or associate themselves with the right kind of keyword/search phrase in search engines. Very few (I found 2 out of 168) told me that I should choose the product first based on whether I like it, find it useful for me or people I care about and/or believe in it being a great solution to the market/industry/space it addresses. As a result of this problem, most of the products that are being promoted this way are completely useless and in most cases, the industries are duplicated several times over with thousands of completely BS products being promoted by guys who have pictures of themselves on the website wearing beach clothes, sitting with a laptop and sipping cocktails (living the dream).

3. Once you sign up with any one of the 50 odd good affiliate programs, you will find that there are thousands of products of pick from. Most of them are not so hot, but there are some of those that are really, really worth the time and money and would be a great help to someone seeking help in that sphere.

Example: There’s this extremely interesting tutorial priced at $47 that shows musicians how they can earn money from publishing their music online. If you have the resources to record your music, then you can become a star by marketing your music online and make oodles of money while also becoming a globally famous band/musician. I think that as far as products go, this is a super find. Don’t you?

Thus I come to what this blog is all about. I decided that I do want to earn money from this affiliate marketing thing. But I am going to do it honestly. I am going to:

1. have a panel of people (made up of my mother, my father, my wife, my friends, relatives and neighbours) who will review whether the product I have picked is useful or not.

2. spend my money in “actually” buying and reviewing the shortlisted “useful” products.

3. I am going to become an affiliate for those products and post up their links (with my affiliate ID) in the hope that people who find these products interesting would buy it and I could make the money I spend in reviewing these products. If I make back more, then it’s a bonus, but I’m just looking at breaking even if I can.

Ofcourse, by becoming an affiliate and then buying the product myself using my own affiliate ID, I get some commission, which would act as a discount, which is especially a relief when the product is somewhat expensive. I’m in India, so buying in dollars can be expensive most time. But I run a super-small PPC management firm, so thankfully I can afford it for now. But I still need to make the money back if I am to carry on with my “do-gooder” activities here. Most affiliate programs discourage this kind of “becoming a member to get discounts on products” thing but since I am in fact going ahead and “marketing” these products, it should not be a problem.

However, if you dislike the fact that I am making money of this, I have posted up a page here that shows you how to remove my affiliate ID from the URL so you can buy the product without me getting my commission.

Click Here to See How to Disallow my Commissions

 

I trust you will use this site nevertheless and help me rate these products based on their usefulness, quality and price. I hope to make a fairly large list of such products in every sphere. Ofcourse this could make me money, but what I really want to see is this becoming a really HUGE repository of HONEST reviews of REALLY USEFUL and APPROPRIATELY PRICED products.

Peace, Love Unity, Respect and Tolerance One and All!

Samar, Mumbai, India

P.S.: Feel free to reprint this anywhere, but PLEASE don’t reprint any of this information into some kind of ebook and sell it for money. That would just be evil! 

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Through the year 2009, may your mornings be full of gratitude for everything you have, days be empowered to experience the bliss of already having anything you want through the day and nights be filled with the overwhelming happiness of the manifestations of all your desires!

Wishing you Peace, Love and
a Most Successful New Year!

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