I first got into the idea of making money online several years ago. At that time, I had no idea what to do, what to sell, or how to do it.
One of the schemes that I tried included selling ebooks. I remember signing up at a site that sold ebooks that you could customise with your own name and appearance. I guess it was effectively a single site to which you could apply your own theme, and your own sub-domain simply redirected to that site, passing in theme details.
I didn't make a single cent from that site, because I had no idea how to promote it.
One thing I remember from that site though, was that it also sold Clickbank products, and it was at that time that I first registered with Clickbank. In fact my Clickbank nickname was generated for me by that site, so every time I log in to Clickbank, I am reminded of it.
That site has long since passed into oblivion, but I still have my Clickbank account, and have always been interested in the possibilities of affiliate marketing.
I sold a few Clickbank products, but never actually received any money from Clickbank. This was due to Clickbank's accounting policies which I never managed to satisfy. Frustrated, I lost interest in Clickbank for a year or two, and by the time I came back to it, I discovered that my account was now empty because Clickbank applies charges to "dormant" accounts - that is accounts that show no activity for an extended period.
Since then, I made a few more sales, and finally passed all the criteria of the accounting polices. Last month I received my first payment from them. What a great relief to get past that stage.
My efforts are not concentrated on promoting Clickbank products at the moment, but I do have a few affiliate links running. I'm now getting a few sales per week from ads that I put on my sites ages ago, which looks promising. I don't get a huge amount of traffic to those sites, which makes it even better. The good thing is that just one sale per month is enough to stop the account going dormant, so my accrued earnings are a lot safer than before.
As it happens, the level of sales that I am currently getting (even with no real promotional effort on my part) mean that I will pass the $100 payment threshold every 6 weeks. Sure, it's not much, but I'm not doing anything to promote it. $100 every 6 weeks is equivalent to $866 per year, for doing almost nothing.
Think how much better I could do if I spent 30 minutes or so every day actively promoting my links?
Oh, and by the way, these are results after Google dropped most of my sites from the search engine results following a hack on my host server. They are only now beginning to recover from that.
