the richest man in atherstone

This is the tale of an affiliate marketing opportunity that came about entirely by accident.

Regular readers know that I occasionally write reviews about financial products I have used. At the beginning of last year, I wrote one such article about the IceSave Instant Access Savings Account.

A couple of months later I noticed I seemed to be getting an above average number of visitors to my site and upon investigation I discovered that I was getting a lot of visits from the Google Search Engine.

After a little more digging, I was happy to find out that the review I wrote was now ranked in the top 2 of Google's search results for the terms 'Icesave' and 'IceSave Review', second only to the IceSave website itself.

At this point, I thought it would be prudent to see if I could join an affiliate program partnered with IceSave to try and cash in on the popularity of the webpage I wrote, however my search was fruitless, so instead I added an extra Google Adsense banner. Although I got one or two extra clicks, the profits from the page were not particularly amazing.

Over the summer I experimented with quite a few different advertising options from ClickBank products to Debt Consolidation Services. All of these advertisements were related in some way to the financial theme of the website and article but none of them earned any more than a few pence. All the time, my review was getting more and more popular with people dropping off their comments at the foot of the article and it became one of the most visited pages of the website.

Fast-forward to the end of September 2007 and I received an unexpected email from an affiliate marketing network. They had recently partnered with IceSave to provide web-based leads and had discovered how highly ranked my review was in search engines for IceSave-related keywords. They wanted me to join their program and I obviously jumped at the opportunity. It was just what I had had been searching for.

I added the relevant banners to my IceSave article and awaited the results.

There were only a few days left in September, so I didn't earn anything in this month, however by the end of October, I was happy to find out that I'd earned £44. November was even better with profits of £88 and December earned me £66.

January 2008 was a fantastic month with earnings of £224 - people are more attuned to saving after Christmas, it seems.

In total I've earned £422 in 4 months. So, what have I learned from this experience?

I'd have to say that I'll never underestimate the importance of matching the right products with right people. I'm not sure what possessed me to try and sell debt consolidation loans to people who had money to save! But even similar products such as other savings accounts and money-making strategies bared no comparison to the success of the actual product I wrote about.

I've also discovered the importance of patience and tenacity in the affiliate marketing game. Although the page was successful in terms of visitors and search engine rankings early on, it didn't begin to be profitable until 9 months after it was written. Eventually, when opportunity came knocking, I was in the prime position to take advantage of it.