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With the arrival of spring, my family taps the maple trees around our house, as well as nearby neighbors’ trees, and we make our own maple syrup. It’s a fun tradition that has been going on since I was a kid, and stocks us up with enough maple syrup to last the entire year!

A few days ago, the season finally began. I was out tapping trees with my dad, when I realized that collecting sap is a lot like making money online. You find a tree, tap it, and hope that it yields lots of sap. Compare this to finding a niche, creating a strategy to tap into the market, and hope it generates income.

Read more about my tree tapping adventure, and how it resembles affiliate marketing online!

We started the day by tapping a few trees that we knew were big sap producers. This came from experience from past years, and even on the very first day the sap began immediately running. Of course, way back when we first started, there was no way to know if these trees would produce good amounts of sap, but we tried anyways.

Finding good trees is the first and hardest step. This is very much like the online world; finding those initial money makers can be very difficult, because not only have you never found one before, but you don’t even know exactly how to go about it. As you can see in these pictures, these trees have 3-4 taps, because we know that they yield lots of sap. Of course, we probably started with just 1 or 2 back on the first try (I don’t remember for sure, I was too young lol).

Getting prospect taps is always a good idea, and even though they won’t always work, some will, and those will make all the effort worthwhile. Here’s a picture of a prospect tree for this year, with just 2 taps.

The same concept applies to affiliate marketing, you may try a few niches and markets that may not work out so well, but when you find ones that do, you can make money from them for years to come.

Of course, you don’t want to invest a huge amount of time, energy, and money into markets that you don’t even know will work. Even experienced marketers can make that mistake though.

Take this little mini cluster of trees for example (below); this is the first year we have tapped them, and we put a ridiculous 6 taps into it. The only problem is that they aren’t really yielding any sap at all, so we are actually going to pull them out. We should have done the same thing as the other tree, and if this were affiliate marketing, this over attempt at a prospect niche could cost a pretty penny.

Just because a tree doesn’t immediately produce sap though doesn’t mean it isn’t working. Take this tree for example (below), it is a great producer we know from past years, but this year it has not produced any so far. Of course, it is also encased in a 5 foot high snow bank, causing it to be way to cold. When that snow melts though, this tree will surely produce good sap.

This is similar to a lot of affiliate offers that perform well depending on “seasonal” conditions. This can range from actual seasons, to approaching holidays, to news coverage etc. It’s tough to know whether an offer isn’t performing well because of the times or just because it stinks, but that’s where experience helps as well. If you can let an offer run for a little longer, say promoting it with natural, free search traffic as opposed to costly PPC, you will be able to give an offer some time and see if it has seasonal potential.

The main goal though is simple, create as many different streams of income as possible. Because if one offer ceases to work, just as one tree may stop producing sap, you will have many others in the wings continuing to produce. Don’t bank all of your efforts on one offer, or all of your buckets on one tree, and you’ll always have plenty of money syrup to go around!

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