Firstly, I would like to apologize for not posting this awesome series of articles for the last few weeks as my life has been consumed with a few “new” objectives and goals which were freshly obtained and looking to be executed shortly. We will hopefully see the fruits of the labor in the short term, as well in a longer range too!
Today’s topic is about not rushing to becoming a superaffiliate and actually taking your time to succeed.
All over the place, you see all sorts of ads from radio, craigslist, random google searches, late night informercials and myspace box ads showing you that you can make money online. They make it seem like it is a fun, crazy, jamboree of an experience with doing the tasks of making money online.
You probably know what I am talking about, in reference to massively marketed systems, but we will not mention the names to protect identities. If you have ever heard the word “There is a sucker born every minute,”.It is the absolute sad reality. The ideologies of most “gurus” that promise get rich quick results as soon as you do one task, in a short amount of time sounds tempting, and of course it always bites the customer in the ass almost every time. For the most part, for the average person, the failure rate is over 90%.
The reality here, is despite all of the bullshit and crap that you see online, television, print, radio, etc. is that there is a core of tried and true internet marketers that know that all is possible, but it doesn’t come overnight. A statement of success that is truly contrarian at best compared to the “gurus” ridiculous slapstick bullshit that they have been pushing.
If you want to be successful, first of all, you have to realize that nothing is easy, nor does it arrive overnight. I once saw a statement from an affiliate meetup group organizer in the NYC area, which read “First, we have to push as much failures as we can before we can start the success path.” At first, I was scratching my head with his thoughts on trial and error. But his message became absolute gospel to me after thinking a while over why we need to fail in order to succeed.
I also ran this thought with my brother Josh while doing chinese food the other day. Josh tells me and I have to agreed wholeheartedly, that failure is when you really your learn your lessons in life and you happen to configure yourself better, to become the better, more organized, well experienced person than before that failure.
It is kinda like Failure connotates a level of experience that helps decide a better track, on a road less traveled, or a thought that could somewhat solves what the problem originally was. This is the end of my failure explanation.
Next, realize with having so many failures, maybe instead of saying “fuck everything” and dropping the ball, keep the ball and keep dribbling the rubber sphere until you can get past the guards and make a better attempt to score a point.
Having the persistence of having the goal in mind, and willing to put up with the cycle of adventure that lies within once more could quite possibly be just enough to score that goal. I remember two and a half years ago, when I started learning php/mysql that I was getting really frusterated with technology, and just wanted to drop everything.
I realized that i have accomplished just about everything that I wanted to do with programming php. What I didn’t realize was, that I was sans a Quotation mark in the SQL string, and because I saw my failure and persisted to learn how to properly write SQL strings, I actually caused a small, but to my mind a freaking huge succcess! I was able to store, and manipulate content data! MAN I WAS PSYCHED!!!
The same remains true for Internet marketing, or whatever goals that you want to accomplish. If you are seeing a line of zeroes in your stats report on clickbank, cj, azoogle, adsense, or whatever affiliate network. Or maybe that you are seeing no sales or conversions with what you are trying to sell, maybe there might be a glitch or two.
Think of the product that you are trying to sell, or the service that you trying to promote. Are you not hitting the correct demographics? Are you not putting out enough content and linkages to create enough traffic? Just think that there is some reason, which with a little hard work and effort, and a drive to say “fuck you” to failure, and hello to completing goals, you shall, and can make it!!!
And as I mentioned earlier, it is not about making the quick buck. Write a blog post and two hours later expect sales to beat your weekly income at your day job. DREAM ON!!! It is about making persistence and pushing yourself to place many links, many reviews, some landing pages, test test test and test, and then repeat.
That is my two cents for now. Now you are probably thinking that I am some type of hypocrite when I mention folks such as Alex Goad and a good pal of mine, Norb Czufis from NC Media. let me tell you from personal experience, that NEITHER of these guys are of the get rich quick type. They are not multi-super-fucking millionaires, and for what they do, they have busted ass for years in marketing strategies and failing on occasion.
If you think all they do is push a button and look pretty, this is absolutely not the picture that you should be painting. They just know how to hide the trial and error, but show a great level of passion and love for the game of the internet dollar.
For those who are looking to build content to promote a certain product of service in the world of affiliate marketing, there is plenty of ways to write different blocks of content or articles to either get traffic, entice purchasers to pull out their wallets, and rank better in google and other major search engines.
The following are a few good sorts of information to get you on the way to seamlessly creating content and wordage for promoting products and services…
1. Learn about the niche that you are promoting: Building information about a niche that you are trying to promote takes knowledge and all the better, experience! At the least, research the niche through a wikipedia article, and if possible read an ebook or try to devote some time to get to know more about the niche.
2. For each product or service that you are promoting, find out the numerous reasons why someone would want to take advantage of such product or service. If you take a certain product found either on clickbank or paydotcom, or any of those affiliate networks, you are going to realize that you are seeing at times THOUSANDS of angles being used at promoting a product.
For example, in the forex niche, i promoted the forex brotherhood which is a currency trading/forex trading community which is spearheaded by Jason Alan Jankovsky. Now, the attack method of marketing this product could be numerous. There are ways where you can attract any level of forex trader. Which the newbie trader needs counseling and support to become a trader who can make a livable income, and extends to the more experienced trader, who wants to know how to get an extra few pips out of each trade, and also want a better edge in their trading style.
3. Use one tiny facet advantage of such product or service and believe it or not, you can make a 400-700 word article on the issue. The facet issue can actually be used as a keyword and should be used liberally in the title, first, and last paragraph of each article/post.
4. First greeting paragraph should be inviting, and addressing the issue of why the person clicked for the article in the first place.
5. Final paragraph should give the person the ideal that this product is the one to purchase, and give them a call to action in purchasing such product now! Then place a Strong Call to ACtion with a link to whatever affiliate link or portal site that you are using!
6. Between the first and last paragraphs, keep speaking about the facet topic at length, but start injecting references to the product or service, and start framing a “transfer of ownership” and make the person think how the product would benefit the problem or facet situation.
7. Remember, with article marketing, the more articles you write and release, akin to fishermen casting their nets, the more fish, or more sales rather that you would manifest.
8. Do not forget to place articles, and pages on the website where your landing page is located at. Google loves relevant material, and will rank you higher for having more relevant, keyword heavy articles.
For the website where the landing page is, I would seriously recommend taking a few sub-domains, or sub-folders, and rolling a wordpress for them each. If your host has a one button solution for this, AWESOME! if not, just upload using an FTP the latest version of Wordpress.
9. After the install and selecting an appropriate theme, plan to write an article or two a day, just for these blogs. Using these methods mentioned above, you should be on the way to creating a successful campaign. As you are creating content, do not forget to link back to your landing page, and also link your landing page at the very bottom to several of your blog posts. The long wordpress permalinks will even be more beneficial.
10. More to come! make some money and kick some ass with these current methods and you could very well be on the way to making some serious damage with affiliate marketing!!!!
No matter how you promote products on the web or in offline formats, you have to realize that content is king, and that it is the words and actions that your content has, is what is going to determine if you are going to have a better chance of converting more eyes to a sale.
For the longest time, Content was only an issue for bringing in the masses and having them read the content to pre-sell them into a certain product or service. Now, the content question has extended another variable, Google.
Now how did Google get into the mess with content? Google and now other search engines have coded and configured their search algorithms to now give higher kudos to sites that have more content. Either in the form of more wordage, more pages, more relevant keywordage to a certain extent, search engines are taking that extra step to filter simple landing pages, that offer only a few bulleted points and a call to action.
Now do not only take into account what the SERPS have in store, but also look into the Search Engines that also sell advertising services, such as Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and other similar services. Using such advertising services used to list clicks on certain keyword terms depending on the highest click bidder. Now that is not much the case anymore, as now not only the bid price for each keyword comes into play, but also the content in your page.
I decided to look into some offers on a certain CPA network and look into some landing pages for “chris brown ringtones” and do content, and keyword research. I have noticed, the top sponsored links on google, not only had a landing page, but also a “web” of content links on the bottom of the page.
I decided to click on some of the links on the bottom of the page, and the links led to something I have never seen on a landing page before: pages of content, not selling the product, but listing pages that were relevant in content, and maybe had a link or two to point back to the main landing page.
Why are the big players doing this? Because simply, content is king. If you want an advantage over the competition, you need to write some articles, not for ezine, or squidoo, but maybe for your own site instead.
Now how can you build content for your site? I will leave that one to you, being the successful internet marketer, you could conjure an idea up and not break a sweat, hopefully!
Have an awesome week! and keep rolling in that cash!
Hello! Welcome to another edition of Adventures in Internet Marketing. Just a quick reminder, I will have my special post for my weight loss campaign later on, for those who view my weight loss monday posts here at iliveinsuccess.com.
This week, my core focus is going to be Time Management, and what to do with your time. As in all business, one area that really could help you in getting more productivity in a short amount of time, is working on your time management.
Alot of businesspeople believe it or not suck at it. How come some people are good with it and some are bad?
Well, some folks are good at timing and run around like chickens with their heads cut off. Some just do not properly budget their time and do not have a clue where to start with making a time management solution.
The most important deal with time management, is planning your time. Of course we will touch on making plans on how to do other aspects of the internet marketing game, but for right now, you need to have a core focus on setting up a time during the day, to do your bidding.
Just like you have a work or class schedule, you need to follow a routine with scheduling. A routine is not as bad as it sounds, because you can build a solid strategy and marketing campaign if you know that you have a block of time, and then the core tasks for that time period.
Let’s say you are a 9-5er who wants to set up 3 hours a day from 6-9pm/1800-2100 three or four days a week, and keep that schedule for four weeks. Ok, also set up one of your weekend days, perhaps Saturday day, for three more hours. Why wouldn’t I schedule on Sunday? Because for some, it is a day of rest, fasting, for me, it is formula one racing and American Football with the guys.
Saturday, is when everybody wakes up, and either laxes around, or calling up their buds to get wasted later on that night, with having of course a few hours to spare.
Use those hours, and follow a formula to work around your marketing strategy. Let’s use a hyptothetical routine for marketing purposes…
The three hour slot starts at 6pm with checking emails and your numbers from marketing, which will take about 10/15 so minutes.
After doing the emails and checking numbers, you would spend the rest of the time doing what is needed for your campaigns and research. Try to have a certain flow, rather you have a set of time blocks doing research for 45 minutes, backlinking for 45, and maybe for the rest do some PPC work or article marketing.
Now you could also set up your schedule on this 3-4 schedule, such as Saturday for research, and Monday for Links, then squidoo wednesdays and Wednesdays for ezinearticles or PPC analysis.
You do not have to follow any of the two, but as long as you have a time management formula that helps increase productivity and increases overall profits, then you are golden!!!
More in planning to come up next week!!!
Make the Money!!!
Tom Howell
www.iliveinsuccess.com
