Bruce's Golden Goose marketing

Almost every new affiliate has encountered this problem at some point.  You spend hours getting accepted at affiliate networks, picking programs, researching keywords, and building a website to promote the products you’ve chosen.  You get the site up, and then you wait.  And wait.  And wait…

Getting traffic requires a lot more than just a good looking site and some well-placed affiliate links.  And of course, without traffic, there are no sales, no commissions, and no checks in the mail.  This is a big part of why most affiliate marketers fail.  You have to be a strategist, a web developer, a writer, and an expert marketer if you want to succeed.  That’s also why there is absolutely no shame in seeking out extra help from experts on any or all of the relevant skill sets.

Tellman Knudson has put together a great guide for helping affiliates get a huge amount of high quality, converting traffic.  It’s designed to be a 20-week course, but a particularly devoted affiliate could probably get through it in much less time.  Remember that most courses are geared towards people with busy work and family lives who are trying to get away from that – so if you have a bit more free time, you can definitely use that to your advantage.

The best part of this particular course is that you can get Easy Traffic Secrets for $4.95 at the moment.  It’s just a trial, but it should be more than enough to let you know if it’s right for you.  That’s less than the price of a typical drink in a bar – so what’s stopping you?

Five years ago, article marketing was all the rage.  Every affiliate was doing it, and many of them were doing quite well with it.  Today, many have abandoned it in favor of “easier” or faster marketing methods that don’t require the tedious job of writing and rewriting endless articles.

Today, affiliates are still doing article marketing and having a lot of success, but they’re doing it a lot more quietly.  It’s no longer the “cool” thing to talk about, and a lot of people are convinced that it’s useless.  That’s great news for those of us who know better.

The key to success with article marketing in 2010 is automation.  You can’t reasonably expect to spend 40+ hours/week writing 500 word articles and submitting them nonstop.  You’d go crazy.  Instead, it’s vital that you write a handful of good articles on a topic (or have someone write them for you) and then spin them to get fresh new content.  Spinning simply takes the articles, runs them through a software, then spits them back out with a slightly different set of words and phrases.  This ensures that search engines don’t view all of your articles as duplicate content and de-index them.

Beyond that, you need to find a way to submit them quickly and automatically.  Although you can never fully automate account creation, you definitely don’t have to sit down and manually submit every article one-by-one.  That’s time better spent on finding new products and markets to promote.

Mass Article Control handles automation on both fronts.  For a very reasonable price, you can spin your articles and submit them with very little manual effort on your part.  For now, it’s $77 to get both pieces of software.  That’s less than 8 hours of time with a typical virtual assistant, and it will give you a lot more submissions in the long run.  Can you really afford not to give it a try?

Building an email newsletter or customer list is one of the best long-term investments you can make as an affiliate.  Your traffic can disappear, and your conversion rates can drop off, but as long as you have a good list of people you can market to, you have a real, long-term asset that costs almost nothing to maintain.

There are a number of practices you should adhere to if you want to maximize your success, though.  Below, we’ll take a look at some of the best practices for affiliate email marketing.

• Don’t wait too long to mail your list. If people sign up for your list, you shouldn’t wait any more than a couple of weeks to reach out to them for the first time.  In fact, even a couple of weeks may be too long in some cases.  Reach out quickly and remind them of who you are and why they joined.
• Don’t let too much time elapse between mailings.  When people suddenly get an email from someone and they can’t remember ever opting in, they tend to make a lot of spam complaints.  That can hurt your standing with your email provider.  It doesn’t do much for your conversion rates, either.
• Stay aware of CAN-SPAM laws.  The penalties for violating CAN-SPAM are quite large, and certainly  not worth the tiny amount of additional income you might make by violating the rules.  Stay safe and check in with the most current laws from time to time.
• Test different types of headlines.  Don’t ever assume that you know what it takes to make a headline that people click on.  Test numerous different tones, styles, and techniques for getting the attention of your reader.  Use short headlines, long headlines, intriguing headlines, and straightforward ones.  Over time, you’ll get a better idea of what works with your audience.

Email marketing is a tough field, and there are professionals who have spent their entire careers learning about the best ways to market by email.  For those of us who don’t have time to do all of that work ourselves, we can take a shortcut by using a provider like aWeber, which offers both mailing services and plentiful advice.

For a lot of us, free traffic is basically the only way we can get started in affiliate marketing.  Although both time and money may be scarce, it’s usually a lot easier to rustle up a bit of extra time each evening.   It also dramatically decreases our potential downside.  Instead of seeing income lost, we see time invested in the learning process.

The problem with free traffic is that it can be difficult to get started if you don’t know quite what to do.  There are literally hundreds of popular sites with excellent free marketing opportunities – Craigslist, YouTube, Squidoo, EZineArticles, Hubpages, Yahoo! Answers, and so on…but what’s most effective?  What is going to give you the best return for the time you invest?

Part of this is just a matter of trial and error.  Some sites require different styles, and two perfectly competent people may have vastly different amounts of success.  To some extent, though, it’s a matter of SEO, traffic patterns, and careful keyword research.  Knowing which sites are hot at the moment and how to best structure your content for those sites…well, that can be gold to us free traffic source marketers.

If you want to learn more about how to leverage the power of completely free traffic, check out The Affiliate Code.  It’s a course that focuses entirely on teaching you how to build a massively profitable business on the backs of many other successful free traffic sources.  Why start from scratch when you can get a jumpstart like that?

The failure rate in affiliate marketing is astonishingly high.  For every 100 people you meet who will try some form of affiliate marketing, you can be pretty confident that only one or two will succeed.  Quite frankly, the odds suck.

Still, there are certain traits that you can spot that will tell you right away which affiliates will succeed and which ones will languish forever in failure.  The failures will spend months or even years planning, plotting, and “learning”.  Nevermind that they already know more than enough to do what needs to be done – they’re just not ready to take the plunge.  Other failures will be woefully unprepared for the challenge.  They’re the people who barely know how to turn their computers on, but they’re convinced that it will turn into their fortune.  That’s not to say that you need a lot of technical know-how, but a simple computer course can head off a lot of problems before getting started.

The ones who succeed are the ones who approach affiliate marketing like a real business.  They pick one or two educational courses, read over the material, and immediately start creating campaigns.  When other affiliates are browsing forums, these future successes are grinding away – making pages, chatting with affiliate managers, and actually risking real money.

The trick is to make sure that you’re one of those affiliates.  Constantly ask yourself if you’re doing what you should be.  Are you worrying about perfection?  Don’t.  You’ll never be perfect, but you WILL be a perfect failure if you never get started.

Start now – if you’re not already, join a course that fits your goals, then start applying what you learn immediately.

Great Internet Marketing Courses to Get You Started:

• Super Cash System
• Make Real Money on the Internet
• Copy & Paste Underground
• The Wordpress Classroom

A lot of affiliates like the idea of a newsletter…in principle.  If you ask, though, most have never actually acted on what they know to be a very good idea.  Building a list has potential for a great ROI if you do it right.  To help you out, I’ve included a number of tips that have been helpful to me.

• Get a trustworthy mailer. I like aWeber because they’re double opt-in (that means that users have to confirm their email address to get on the list) and they have extremely high deliverability rates.  They’re also very affordable.  Click here if you want to learn more about their plans.
• Mail frequently. If you don’t, people have  tendency to forget who you are.  When your mailing finally arrives, they’re likely to hit the “Spam” button because they don’t hear from you often enough to remember when they opted into your correspondence.
• Make it timely. While this may not apply to all fields and topics, people definitely appreciate current information.  If you can save them a trip to their favorite website for the same information, you’ve saved them time and helped to win their favor.
• Keep your tone consistent with your website (if you have one) and your audience’s sophistication level.  If you’re writing about web marketing but targeting people with brick and mortar businesses, your language will be much less technical than if you’re writing about the same topic for industry veterans.
• Don’t be afraid of templates. If you have no design skills, there’s absolutely no shame in using a template.  Heck, you can even joke about it if your audience is a casual one, but for goodness sake, have mercy on their eyes.  Don’t go the DIY route and create some fluorescent monstrosity that gives everyone eyestrain.
• Keep it simple. If you want to highlight a lot of content, offer links to your website where people can view it all.  Don’t clog up their inbox with a 10,000 word email.

Are there any good techniques I’m missing?  I’m sure there are tons, so feel free to chime in on the comments.

A lot of retired adults would love to find ways to generate additional income, but they’re not sure that affiliate marketing is right for them.  The irony is that I can’t really think of too many people in a better situation to give affiliate marketing a try.  If you’re a recently retired person thinking about affiliate marketing, there are a few tips I would offer:

• Get a tech guy. If you’re not up to date on using your computer, that’s not a huge deal.  You DO need to be able to handle the basics, though, and it can be made much easier if you get someone to help you.  Whether it’s your grandson, the neighbor kid, or someone on a forum who trades tech expertise for business skills, there’s always a way to get someone who can help you avoid banging your head on the wall.
• Start out with free marketing methods.  If you’re on a fixed income, do NOT waste your money on expensive ad campaigns or courses.  Pick one or two courses if you feel you need some extra education, but try to focus on free traffic methods.  Article writing, email newsletter building, social media, and blogging are all great “free” marketing methods.
• Don’t let people smooth talk you.  In marketing, people like to talk fast and push hard for the sale.  Don’t let yourself get talked into things you don’t want, and don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t be successful.  If you have 20-40 years of work experience, you have a huge advantage over the 20-somethings with no work ethic.
• Pick a training course that fits your personal style. Don’t invest in a course that sounds too technical if you’d rather stick with simple tactics like article marketing.  Be true to yourself and you’ll do well.  I’ve included some recommendations for training courses and tools below.

Make Real Money on the Internet

The Wordpress Classroom

Mass Article Control

Now get out there and show us youngins how it’s done!

Although a lot of affiliates do prefer to start out with the CPA networks and their lead gen or free trial offers, there’s also a lot to be said for starting out with physical products.  Instead of using networks like Azoogle and Clickbooth, affiliates who promote physical products use networks like CJ, Linkshare, and Shareasale.  And instead of using traditional affiliate landing pages, affiliates promoting physical products are more likely to build larger niche sites around several products.

A lot of affiliates shy away from physical products because they believe the commissions are too low.  While that can certainly be true in some cases (especially if you’re paying for your traffic), there are a few advantages that these affiliates are overlooking:

• Physical product sites tend to have higher quality scores due to a larger amount of unique content.
• Physical product sites nearly always get a steady flow of search engine traffic, assuming that the most basic SEO measures have been implemented.
• Physical product sites are very stable.  Instead of offers that rotate on an almost weekly basis, you have real products that can last years with the same links.
• There are a huge number of datafeed tools to semi-automate the process of building sites around physical products.
• Ad networks love ads for “real” products.  When you order a free trial acai berry product or you sign up for auto loan comparison, a lot of people get something they’re not fully expecting (rebills, endless calls from having their personal info sold, etc.).  With physical products, people know what they’re getting and everything is on the up-and-up.

If you’re interested in learning more about promoting physical products, Matt Wolfe’s Wordpress Classroom is a great place to start.   By using Wordpress as your content management system, you greatly simplify the overall creation and management of your affiliate site.  You’ll not only learn how to earn an income here, you’ll learn to create a stable, lasting source of income for you and your family.

When it comes to affiliate marketing, it can be hard to decide if you want to specialize in a single method of traffic generation, or if you want to diversify and stabilize your income.  The problem is that if you spread yourself too thin, you run the risk of not making any money at all.  After all, you have to have some skill to make money online, and it’s hard to develop it if you’re trying to learn everything.  On the other hand, specializing can leave you vulnerable to policy changes that can wipe out your income overnight.  So, what is an affiliate to do?

If you’re making money already, figure out how much you’re making.  Are you at 50% of your goal income?  100%?  If you’re approaching a significant portion of your goal income and you’re profitable in one area, it’s time to start branching out.  Master a new area, get it successful, and then repeat.  Eventually, you will find that you have steady streams of income in multiple areas – leaving you less successful to the kinds of changes that leave many affiliates desperate.

If you haven’t found success in a single area, though, you need to focus first and then branch out.  If you try to branch out prematurely, you’re only going to delay your success in all areas.  Gaining mastery in one area makes it easier to eventually master others, and it’s also much easier to focus on learning just one area first.  Who needs to worry about trying to master 10 different traffic sources when they’re just learning about landing pages and tracking?

So the answer here is actually very simple – go deep in one method of promotion until you find success, then go broad and master other areas.  You’ll build an income that’s both large and stable, bringing you closer to the life you’ve always dreamed about.

Great Internet Marketing Courses to Get You Started:

• Super Cash System
• Make Real Money on the Internet
• Copy & Paste Underground
• The Wordpress Classroom

A lot of people are out there looking for the secret to being a successful affiliate.  They’ll spend thousands of dollars in hopes of finding it, and they read tons of courses and feel somehow unsatisfied every time.  Surely, there must be some piece of the puzzle that they’re missing…

They are missing a secret, but I’ll tell you what it is.  It’s persistence.  We all have obstacles and weaknesses and setbacks, but people who are persistent enough for long enough will find that eventually, they encounter something else – a stroke of luck.  For most of us, it takes a lot of hard work and failure to finally get to the “luck” we perceive others to have found in their marketing efforts.

Some of us have a hit with our first campaign.  Others take 20, 30, or even 50 before we “get lucky” and start to make some money.  The one thing I know for certain, though, is that nearly anyone can make money online if they are truly persistent.  Maybe it will be with article marketing, maybe it will be social media, and maybe it will be PPC – but you won’t know until you start somewhere and give it a serious, honest try before moving on to the next thing.  Too many people drift aimlessly between methods and then give up way too soon.

If you’re still struggling, this is my recommendation – pick ONE course (lots of good recommendations below) and stick with it.  Give it a minimum of 90 days of real effort.  You might even want to give it 6 months if you’re doing SEO, since it takes longer to build momentum there.  While you’re doing that, ignore the blogs, ignore the forums, and just use Google if you have a vital question.  If you don’t get results in that time, it’s probably safe to assume that the method isn’t going to be the best one for you.  Then – and only then – move on to something different.

Great Internet Marketing Courses to Get You Started:

• Super Cash System
• Make Real Money on the Internet
• Copy & Paste Underground
• The Wordpress Classroom