I thought I would share a recent business failure of mine with you today. I hope to share my experience, and hope you learn something in the process, as well as let you know that if you’ve failed before you are not alone.
Profit Instruments is (update: WAS) a website that offers a fairly expensive program which promises to teach you how to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in passive income with niche affiliate marketing websites, or in other words – how to create websites that provide an overly positive review of a product so that when people click to buy the product you make a commission.
A few months ago, when Profit Instruments first came about, they released a free video along with a PDF for instructions on how to create and monetize a niche affiliate site. I was so excited about the free content (they made it sound so good, after all) that I almost put a post up to tell you about it. I decided to try it myself first since I was skeptical, and see what happened.
The idea behind Profit Instruments is to find an affiliate product with generous profit-sharing and potential, get a website with “product name + review.com” or something similar, install WordPress, and write a couple blog posts dedicated soley to providing a review of the product (biased, of course, to buying the product).
The site that I created was www.bigcontentsearchreview.com, which promotes a monthly membership service called Big Content Search for internet marketers. The affiliate commission percentages were great, and even better – recurring since it’s a monthly membership. The traffic was light, but it was a brand new business so I felt that this would improve, and there was hardly any competition at the time.
The “Profit Instruments Revealed” free PDF gave specific advice for when to publish blog posts, what to write about, and how to identify keywords. It also provided some site indexing and feed capture tools to get exposure to the site, which was supposed to “automatically” give the site a great position in Google. Everything was supposed to be fine-tuned and perfected to provide immediate results.
I didn’t time the blog posts correctly, but other than that I followed the instructions fairly closely. The results? Big Content Search Review has had about 30 total unique visitors go to the site in 3 months. Pretty pathetic huh? I definetly picked a poor affiliate product since so few people were looking for it and my audience (internet marketers) are pretty smart about spotting other obvious sales pitches. However, with the popularity of Profit Instruments, it was tough to find any decent affiliate products without some serious competition. More than that, this niche affiliate website was purely for making money. It provided no value to anyone. I want to make money, but I want to do it by adding value to the world – not like this.
Affiliate marketing has some potential as a business-model, but it has to be the right product and has to provide value. A simple niche website like this might make you some money, but it will never be fulfilling. No one’s passion is to scam people into buying things based on a phony review.
NOTE: I actually did have one person sign up for the $1 free trial. Time will tell if they end up paying for the monthly subscription.
