Having left affiliate management, Gerodie’s focused on his new venture as an affiliate marketer and actively oversees and manages several properties with his business partners.

I invited Gerodie on the Friday Podcast to get his insight on:

• Techniques on setting up and optimizing PPC and SEO offers
• How your AdWords account history can impact your PPC campaigns
• PPC bidding strategies
• His perspective on spytools and analytics services
• How to continually keep yourself motivated to succeed and scale your business
• Business management and growth tips

Check out the podcast below:

Links:

• Geordie on twitter
• Geordie’s previous appearance on the Friday Podcast

Here’s more goodness from the Affiliate Summit:

ShareASale’s Director of Client Services Carolyn Tang AKA Catango is one of the most pleasant and knowledgeable individuals in the industry and it was a pleasure to talk to her at the SaS booth, even though there were lots of people there.

As a tradeshow visitor, I’ve got more than my fair share of t-shirts, notepads, pens, paper weights and stationery to last 2.5 lifetimes. I liked how SaS did a little out of the box thinking to provide a photobooth where affiliates took some crazy pics (I’ll post mine later), and thoughtfully gave out baby T-shirts and bears. For affiliates with families or significant others, they’ll likely be seeing the SaS logo on a teddy bear or baby T for some time to come. (a good thing).

Check out the Friday Podcast interview on Affiliate Program Strategies with Carolyn Tang.

It was cool hanging out with top affiliates Colin “Google” McDougall and Ros Gardner over dinner at the Nobu Japanese restaurant at the Hard Rock for the private launch of Jim Lillig’s Offeratti network.

Considering that Colin doesn’t take raw food, it’s a testament to the great food at Nobu that Colin was enjoying the sashimi with the rest of us during the meal. It was also interesting to hear Colin tell his stories about his towed trailer that he rolls out for holidays. And if you’re looking for inspiration as you’re working towards your ideal affiliate lifestyle, Ros has bought a lot of nice toys/trinkets to enjoy the fruits of her labor.

It was great to meet affiliate network Market Leverage‘s marketing manager Dina Riccobono after talking to her over IM and being interviewed for MLTV late last year.

Market Leverage has a proactive outreach and affiliate recruitment program and it’s refreshing to see a network take the intiative in getting to know affiliates. They hosted a dinner at Switch at the Encore hotel, with Market Leverage CEO Mike Jenkins in attendance. It was a great opportunity to talk to affiliate managers Mike Kelly and Jen Fluker to get insight into how affiliate managers operate.

At the dinner, Mike announced the launch of Market Leverage’s greenlinks program, which provides links to video-based affiliate training from the ML website interface.

Here’s an earlier Friday Podcast with Market Leverage CEO Mike Jenkins

Jen Goode, better known as JGoode, headed the Affiliate Summit mentors program and did a great job (I believe there were more than 100 mentees in the program). I also had a picture taken with the penguin and nearly kidnapped him. Ah well, maybe next time.

In the meantime, check out the Friday Podcast with Jen talking about Print-On-Demand product strategies

With Jon Fisher AKA AOJon , founder of the WickedFire affiliate marketing forum. I started making these “gang signs” because a number of the “affiliate gangstas” started making them.

Before the panel discussion on Affiliate Strategies for Traffic Generation and Sales Conversion on the first day of the summit with Miles Baker, Geordie Carswell, Nickycakes.

The session went well with positive feedback submitted by the session attendees.

I’ll likely plan and submit a proposal for another panel in the future.

Nicky was recently interviewed by Tracking202’s Wes Mahler. You can check out the interview here.

Here’s my Friday Podcast interviews:

• Miles Baker
• Geordie Carswell
• Nickycakes

With Team Mystery from VH1’s The Pickup Artist season 2. Pickup artist Mystery AKA Erik Von Markovik – we both share the same birthday btw.) and “Hawaii” and Jason Adams.

Soon a crowd gathered:

It was a pleasure to finally meet Todd Crawford in the flesh:

I was trying to do my best impression of a “Todd Talk” impersonation.

what I found was interesting is that his wife has been keeping a record of all the celebrities he’s been mistaken for. And if you met him in the flesh, you might mistake him for a rockstar.

Check out Todd’s Friday Podcast interview on Affiliate Management

Mike Krongel is founder and CEO of the Copeac affiliate network.

It’s been one of the better performing CPA networks on my sites. If you haven’t yet, check them out.

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That’s it for this update.

More to come.

Affiliate Bloggers Speak Out Panelists: (Left to Right) Nickycakes, Geordie Carswell, Miles Baker

I’ve the honor of moderating an affiliate marketers panel with panelists: Geordie Carswell, NickyCakes and Miles Baker in attendance.

The session is geared towards newer and experienced marketers who’d like to tap on the expertise of the panel which spans search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, social media and blogging.

The panelists and I are compiling questions for the session.

If you’ve a question or issue, go ahead and list it in the comments below.

If you’re an affiliate signed up to multiple networks, you’d receive a constant barrage of daily emails with subject lines like “network exclusives, promote now!”, “Highest payouts!” and “Hot new offers”.

Likewise, I’ve checked out a couple of affiliate marketing forums where networks have sponsored sections of the forums and populated these sections with “These offers are hot!” then proceed to list down payouts and offer caps.

–

I don’t know how you feel, but this is pretty much tantamount to email and social network spamming by overzealous affiliate managers.

A good affiliate manager should know when to promote offers and when to back off. And emailing/hounding me when I say I’m busy is one way to get on my really bad side.

The other thing that’s disturbing is how little time many affiliate managers take to understand their affiliates. Granted, each AM might have 500 affiliates under them with just 5-10% of them actively promoting campaigns.

But my thought is this – If you’re already investing a couple of minutes using an instant messenger or making a phone call to the affiliate: what’s the best way to use this time?

Should you:

1) TELL the affiliate about your best converting offer, and the exclusives and the highest payouts. (I doubt an affiliate running a credit repair website might be able to clear many acaiberry lead gen offers for you…)

OR

2) Should you ASK the affiliate what type of offers they’re interested in, and filter your pool of offers down to the most relevant 10-20 and email that information over?

The concept of customer relationship management (CRM) does not apply only to the advertiser-affiliate network relationship because the advertiser is paying for the leads/customers, I’d say that affiliates are equal part “customers” in the equation too.

–

Having said that, using Twitter, or a blog to publish an endless stream of breaking news on “offer updates” is just another way of doing what everyone else is doing.

Here are a couple of ways to disrupt the “traditional” way of affiliate management, and stepping the standards up a notch:

Engage with affiliates: This is more than just sending me a Christmas card (even if I live halfway around the world), it’s engaging and understanding your affiliates’ requirements.

Geordie Carswell, back when he was CEO of affiliate network Revenuewire, would be available over AIM to give PPC campaign tips and promotion ideas. Likewise, Mike Krongel, CEO of Intermark Media which owns the Copeac network would be available too.

These days, Ralph Ruckman AKA “Ruck” is active on the Wickedfire forum and actively posts on the Convert2Media blog and gives out promotion ideas on the C2M affiliate forum with clear, actionable ideas to promote the offers on his network. Not to mention that his partner and co-founder Steve Howe practically lives on AIM.

–

Building A Goodwill Virus: I hadn’t heard of Market Leverage till meeting some of their team at the Affiliate Summit last year. Since then, they’re proactively got my mailing address from my domain whois information and sent me a schwag bag earlier this year (and included some gifts for my daughter too).

Likewise, they’ve been following on their promotion efforts by organizing a series of contests on the popular blogs and rollout their “Cashinator” money grabbing machine thingie at events they’re taking part in. While these items and cash won’t be significant for successful affiliates, it does demonstrate that affiliates are a priority for the network and building credibility and a reputation among the affiliate community are some of its goals.

Also, having a regular video broadcast does help build the reputation of the affiliate network (or merchant). Market Leverage has it’s Market Leverage TV weekly broadcast, while Buy.com has it’s Buy.tv broadcasts.

If anything these intiatives demonstrates the networks or merchant’s investment in long-term projects which will ultimately bear fruit from its core of affiliates.

Taking some of lessons to mind when attending an event like Affiliate Summit will help any network get more mileage out of their participation in the event.

–

Related podcasts:

• Mike Jenkins, founder Market Leverage
• Geordie Carswell, former CEO Revenuewire
• Dina Riccobono, Market Leverage marketing manager

And the inertia of business and projects has kept my intended blogroll update moving forward for a couple of months (yes, months).

If you’re headed to the Affiliate Summit next month, do drop a note in the comments below and be sure to say “hi” especially if we meet up at one of the parties or at the booths.

Here’re some of my old friends and new friends I’ve made in the last year (and recently added to the blogroll).

Miles Baker: A work-at-home dad who’s tried just about everything on the internet, Miles is a successful affiliate who’s built a healthy number of profitable sites. He’s one of the panelists at the affiliate panel on the first day of the Affiliate Summit.

Check out Miles’ appearance on my Friday Podcast.

Miles’ Twitter account

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NickyCakes: Nick calls himself a “reformed blackhat” whose main focus is on pay per click-based affiliate marketing. He’s posted a number of innovative affiliate strategies on his blog (in between pointing out perceived pretentiousness among certain affiliates). Nick will also be one of the panelists on the affiliate panel at 1230pm on the first day of the summit.

Nick’s previous appearance on the Friday Podcast.

Nick’s Twitter account

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Geordie Carswell: Geordie’s the 3rd and final member of the affiliate panel. Though he doesn’t actively blog, he’s focused on building his new outfit, Diversion Marketing. Although he’s quite accomplished at PPC, he’s since started work on a couple of different projects and I might have him on a future episode of the Friday Podcast.

In the meantime, you can check out his previous appearance on the Friday Podcast where he talked about affiliate success strategies.

Geordie’s twitter account

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Chad Frederiksen: Better known as “CDF Networks”, Chad has the distinction of being one of the top 10 AzoogleAds affiliates early on. PPC is his forte and he shared a number of strategies during his time on the Friday Podcast.

Chad’s twitter account.

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John Hasson: John has a background as a programmer and has developed and sold his own software prior to becoming an affiliate. He’ll be presenting a session on automating your PPC campaigns at the Affiliate Summit. Meanwhile, you can check out his appearance on the Friday Podcast.

John’s Twitter account

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Kris Trujillo: Having taken over the CashTactics blog from founder Ralph “Ruck” Ruckman, Kris has a number of ongoing internet marketing projects, in addition to his search engine optimization (SEO) consulting services. He appeared on the Friday Podcast to talk about build a search engine-based business.

–

Andrew Payne: Also blogging at CashTactics, Andrew is a PPC marketer and he has recently authored a PPC case study covering the fundamentals of niche selection and setting up your campaign. He also provided bonus material during the Friday Podcast.

–

Todd Crawford: Todd is one of the co-founders of the Commission Junction affiliate network in 1998 and is currently working on his “secret project”. In the meantime, he posts pictures and comments about watches, t-shirts and other gizmos he’s either bought, is trying out or is in the process of buying, I guess his ToddTalks site is like a shopping blog for geeks? Check out his thoughts on affiliate management on the Friday Podcast.

Todd will be moderating a session on combating fraud in affiliate marketing at the Affiliate Summit.

Todd’s Twitter account.

–

Joel Comm: Back when I first got started in internet marketing, Joel’s “Adsense Code” book was one of the first I’d read. I’m currently going through his “Click Here To Order” book which is a great narrative about the key players in internet marketing got their start and built their businesses. I met Joel in Vegas and he’ll be presenting a session on mobile marketing (direct marketing to cellphones) at the summit.

Joel’s twitter account

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If you’re interested in afttending the Affiliate Summit, it’s at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas from Jan 11-13.

Click here to book a place

Discount code: ASW09WHOISAW to save 10% off any type of pass

For a media pass, visit this link.

Next on the list would be the terrific networking events and parties, especially the near legendary ones hosted by the ShareASale affiliate network, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get to bring home a polaroid with SAS founder Brian Littleton in his trademark sweatervests.

This isn’t to say that the sessions are to be unrated. This upcoming summit will feature speakers like previous Friday Podcast guests – affiliates Geordie Carswell, Nickycakes, Miles Baker, Jeremy Palmer, John Hasson, Zac Johnson, Market Leverage CEO Mike Jenkins, Scott Jangro, Buy.com’s Melissa Salas, Amit Mehta, Anik Singal, as well as “Sugarrae” Rae Hoffman, Carolyn “CShel” Shelby, PartnerCentric CEO and founder Linda Woods, affiliate OPM Andy Rodriguez, ABestWeb founder Haiko de Poel Jr, FlamingoWorld CEO Connie Berg, Brian Littleton, SEER Interactive’s Wil Reynolds, Ros Gardner and Ian Fernando.

I think the upcoming summit boasts a stellar speakers lineup and it’ll be a hard decision to split my time between the educational sessions and panels vs time in the exhibit hall.

I managed to squeeze some details from Shawn Collins about the Affiliate Triathlon. He said “There will be three secret events of skill and dexterity and the competitor with the highest overall score wins.” – which translated means you’ll probably have to do something silly and likely mildly embarrass yourself, but will look pretty cool in pictures and do something great for the National Breast Cancer Foundation.

The event which runs from Jan 11-13, currently still has tickets available, though Shawn has mentioned that the bulk of registrations come in 60 days before the event and are available now, though it’s hard to tell how long they’ll last.

The Affiliate Summit is held at the same time as the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and adult industry’s AVN (Adult Video Network) awards at the Mandalay Bay. So catching a porn starlet might be a minor perk for some attending the summit? The affiliate networks and especially CPA networks are known for innovative events and mixers at these events, so maybe we’ll see Tila Tequila (former Playboy playmate Tila Ngyuen and star of the “A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila” reality show). Incidentally, Tila’s born in Singapore and if you think I’m pulling your leg, check out her Wikipedia entry. Obviously, since college students are submitting their senior essays based on Wikipedia, it’s as good as the Encyclopedia Brittanica, right?

But back to the Affiliate Summit…

WineLibrary.tv creator and presenter Gary “Bring the Thunder” Vaynerchuk who kicked butt at the “marketing with video” panel discussion at the last ASW will be delivering the keynote this time. It should be a great session with Gary’s trademark energy, candor and humor.

The deadline for getting your room at the summit group rate of $159/night is valid till Dec 9th, though it’s likely to run out before then. Check out the group reservation rate.

Jeremy Palmer mentioned a code “PKGR2CT” for a $0.02 Tuesday if you stay at least 2 nights. You may or may not be able to use the code in conjunction with the group rate.

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Lastly, get your tickets now if you haven’t yet, the summit reservation link is here. [Use discount code: ASW09WHOISAW to save 10% off any type of pass]

If you have an active affiliate blog or report on internet marketing news, you can apply for a media pass.

Viva Las Vegas.

The speakers for the workshop element of the Affiliate Summit have been selected, and I’ll be moderating a session “Affiliate Bloggers Speak Out: Tips on SEO, PPC and Sales Conversion” at the upcoming Affiliate Summit which is from Jan 11-13 in Las Vegas next year.

Together with me for the session will be the panelists:

Affiliate Bloggers Speak Out Panelists: (Left to Right)Nickycakes, Geordie Carswell, Miles Baker

This’ll be a great session not only because the three panels are highly skilled affiliate marketers, but they have very different strengths too. Although Nickycakes and Geordie (former affiliate network Revenuewire CEO turned affiliate) use PPC (pay per click) in their traffic generation efforts, there’s a number of differences in their methods, while Miles Baker uses powerful SEO techniques.

We’ll likely be collecting questions for the session a couple of weeks before the summit, so you can get your burning questions answered.

Stay tuned!

PS: I’ve also heard that the other speakers at the summit include affiliate management firm’s Paulson Management Group founder and president Heather Paulson will be presenting a session on “Advanced Affiliate Management Strategies”, while top affiliate John Hasson will be “Automating Websites and PPC Management” (a technical session which will provide you with massive leverage in your business).

The Affiliate Summit continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Be sure to check it out.

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If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out these Friday Podcast sessions:

• NickyCakes
• Miles Baker
• Geordie Carswell
• John Hasson

If you’re relying on organic traffic generation methods, especially from the search engines, there have been recent developments which may cause a change in your strategy.

Some of these include:

• The Rise of Blackhole Seo
• Changes in ranking alogorithmn like Google PageRank (a number of websites and blogs saw their PR score drop by 1 or more in recent weeks) and Alexa rankings have fluctuated greatly since the system was change a number of months ago
• Looming changes Google plans to or has implemented since as lower weightage given to directory links (thanks Wil Reynolds for the heads-up), including paid Yahoo directory submissions.

Which can be like an earthquake sending ripples through your business and earnings if you’re not prepared.

I was speaking with Geordie Carswell, former RevenueWire CEO who’s now involved with his own affiliate marketing projects and his business is thriving, despite the negative indicators about the economy.

In most cases, even with the drop from Google’s PR and dip in Alexa rankings, traffic and conversion levels still remain strong within my websites.

In almost all cases, launching a new campaign or creating a new product will more than offset any hits (real or imagined) that arose because of a change in the search engine algorithmn.

The challenge in being a successful online marketer lies in being able to adapt to change and more importantly, staying ahead of the curve.

By adding new tactics and new strategies to what you’re already doing, you can more than overcome any negatives in the present or the future.

It’s a loss for PPC marketers that Geordie will be stepping down as CEO on August 1st, though he will be continuing with Revenuewire on an advisory basis.

Geordie had published a number of tips and updates focused on utilitizing and optmizing Google AdWords since he started posting on the blog.

Perhaps as a sign of the changing of the guard, the blog format has been changed to something closer to an article directory – perhaps a sign that updates may not be as frequent either.

The Revenuewire CEO post will be filled by Havind Sehmi who headed the University of Victoria’s Innovation and Development Corporation. Havind has played a crucial role in several university technology spin-off companies and negotiated well over 500 successful partnership engagements.

Affiliate Summit East (held in Boston from Aug 8-10) attendees will get to meet Havind.

Meanwhile, Geordie will be posting updates at his personal site GeordieCarswell.com.

All the best, Geordie!

PS: If you haven’t yet, you might like to check out this Friday Podcast edition featuring Geordie.

So having eaten my lunch while MythBusters was playing on Discovery, I finally opened up the box containing my new MacBook 2.1 Ghz machine (a freebie bundled together with my new 10mbps DSL plan).

While Jamie and Adam are firing machine guns into the side on a car on the screen, I’m pulling the polycarbonate-sheathed laptop out of the box.

First reaction: This thing is pretty heavy compared to my Fujitsu Lifebook ultra-portable.

Second reaction: The graphics are really pretty (I can see why Sam Harrelson and Shawn Collins get into their Asus eee/Apple/Dell Vostro bickering matches)

Third reaction: I don’t quite like the tactile feel of the keyboard. The keys don’t have the “sink” of a traditional keyboard (but that could be easily remedied with a regular-sized USB keyboard). I am just wondering why the Apple developers don’t include the “double tap” on the touchpad simulating a mouse click – that would greatly enhance productivity.

Fourth reaction: I’m not too certain what the Mac equivalents of “control-a”, “control-c” and “control-v” are on the Mac. I think it’s the “open Apple” button.

My first “proper” computer ever was an Apple ][e and I spent 3 years as a desktop production editor working on Apple Quadras in the early 1990s, so I think I’ll be able to make the transition.

I’m still mulling over Geordie Carswell’s advice to ditch the default 1GB of ram and go for the 4GB max.

The MacBook seems to have a proprietary interface for connecting an external monitor, so I still have to figure that one out.

And yes, the absence of a mouse is sorely missed.

As far as I’m aware, Google AdWords Editor does not run on OS X, unless you’re running Basecamp or Parallels or some other cross-platform…It’ll all have to wait till tax season is over and I’ll have time to fiddle with it.

The iSight built-in webcam seems to take pretty killer pictures though…

At times like this, I’m glad that my skype contact list is filled with a host of Apple geeks.

More updates after April 15th.

With the Affiliate Summit just days away, here’re a few pointers especially if it’s your first time to the summit:

• Vegas Throat: Specific to Las Vegas, you will lose your voice very easily if you don’t take care of your throat. The dry desert air creates a lot of static electricity, it also dries out your throat and you’ll find yourself losing your voice at the end of day 1 or day 2 if you don’t drink enough liquids or take throat lozenges to give your throat a break. Also worth trying a a honey drink at the end of the day (real honey, not that cheap honey-flavored sugar syrup typically sold at grocery stores). I’m bringing a herbal throat syrup that I expect will do wonders (known in Chinese as “Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa”.
• Camera/Video Camera/Flip Camera: Do the touristy thing and take lots of photos during the summit. Better yet, take lots of pictures with people so you can remember what they look like. It’s fairly safe to assume that 90% of bloggers will look NOTHING like what their avatar looks like. (present company included).
• Business Cards: Yes, the reciprocity thing takes place. I give you my card, you give me your card. Generally a great practise, although if you live in the US, you can expect to get lots of follow up calls over the next week. The most important thing about collecting business cards is to follow up within a week after the summit, something that Stephanie Agresta (AKA Internet Geek Girl) is great at. On another note, if you’re like me and collect a couple of hundred business card each year, be sure to carry a pen and scribble “ASW08” on the back of the card, especially after you put it in the huge pile in your office later.
• It’s COLD: Expect a low of 32 deg F according to the weather forecasts, so bring a heavy coat if you get chilly.
• Networks ahead of the summit: Contact people and companies you’d like to meet, especially if you go through the exhibitors list, or if you know that a particular affiliate or blogger is headed over. Some of the people I’m looking forward to meeting: Heather Paulson, Stephanie Agresta, Sam Harrelson, James and Arlene Martell, Jim Lillig, NeverblueAds’ Samantha Brachat, Revenuewire CEO Geordie Carswell. I talk to many of these folks on a daily basis, but it’s always great to meet up in person.
• Take the shuttle bus: If you’re not in a great hurry, the shuttle bus at the airport costs $7 and goes to the major hotels. The taxi ride costs $20 and is a whole lot faster, but you’ll not see as much of the Strip as you would from the bus.
• Plan your schedule: There’s lots of exciting stuff going on at the summit at any single point in time, so you need to work out a schedule of where you want to be at what time. Else there’s a good chance you’ll miss a meeting or miss a workshop session because you were out on the show floor talking to people.
• Get enough rest: With the summit lasting three days, it’s not too bad. But by the morning of day 2, you’ll start to see people dragging themselves along, or mysteriously disappearing in the afternoon to catch some rest. If you rest up on Friday and Saturday, you should have enough energy to last through the event (even with some parties going on till 4am…)
• ***Most important***: Have a goal and an agenda in mind: Are you at the summit to check out a specific affiliate/CPA network? Visit their website, talk to other affiliates before you attend the show. Are you there to network with a particular individual or company? Visit their blog, find out if they haunt a specific forum and read their posts there. If I were an affiliate manager, and if I was motivated to recruit new affiliates, I’d compile a “hit list” of the top 50 (or if I was really motivated top 100) affiliates, I’d visit their blog or website, and check them out, make some notes. Contrary to popular belief, just having ONE canned presentation doesn’t cut it. Sad to say, but going to every booth and being told “we have the highest payouts, and we have many exclusive offers” makes for quite the yawn-fest. I think being able to present your product and your network in a unique fashion, helps pique the interest of experienced affiliates who’re already have accounts on 10 other CPA networks. So please, have a little pow-wow before heading to the summit, figure out a plan of attack that goes beyond “highest payout, exclusive offers” and you will definitely hook more than your fair share of super affiliates.

Does anyone have other advice?

With some affiliates racking up between 800 and 1,000 sales a day and with payouts of about $25 per license, that adds up to about close to a cool $1 million in gross commissions each month.

And the good news is that the software market still has a lot of room for growth.

During our discussion, Geordie went into detail about:

• How to evaluate software products to promote
• Create an effective marketing campaign that will maximize your profits
• Promoting digital products using PPC (pay per click traffic) vs SEO (search engine optimization)
• PPC tactics that the affiliate big dogs use that you may not be aware of yet
• Comparing the Google Search network vs the Content network

Geordie is one of the most savvy PPC marketers I have come across and it was great to get the PPC tips from him and a wealth of information about getting started as a software promoting affiliate.

Check out the Friday podcast below:

Note: Revenuewire will hold it’s official launch at Affiliate Summit West in Vegas next week. Geordie and Revenuewire team members will be at the booth in the tradeshow hall.

Also check out:

–> Revenuewire

–> The Revenuewire PPC Blog

I’ve created a temporary page listing my schedule (which will change over time) and the summit highlights.

You can take a look at:

–> Andrew Wee’s Affiliate Summit West schedule

Going by the last summit I attended, I met Scott Jangro and Geordie Carswell just once during the entire 3 days.

I hung out mostly with the WickedFire affiliate marketing forum folks.

You will meet so many people at one point that it will seem like a blur and it’s only after going through the business cards that you’ll recall who you met.

So if you would like to meet and talk to someone during the summit, it’d be a good idea to either:

• Private message them on their Facebook profile
• Contact them using the contact form on their blog
• Attend the session they’ll be speaking at.
• Head to one of the smaller events like Affiliate Classroom Live, Gospel Brunch, the Affiliate Dinner
• Arrange to meet at one of the parties and try to find each other from the hundreds of people there…

Else, it could be a hit-and-miss affair, especially with more than 2,500 people registered for the event.

Forewarned is forearmed…

Note: The notes are pretty detailed, though the podcast itself contains even more content.

Enjoy!

Duration: 18 minutes | Filesize:  4.5 mb

Notes:

I get many questions about the tactical aspects of internet marketing, like what’s the best webhost, which is the best CPA network, how to configure a xml datafeed, how to use an autoresponder, which is the best ebook.

If you’re interested, I mention a number of these in the course of my blogging and i’ve listed a couple in my recommendations tabs.

But here’s the kicker, although these ‘technical’ questions represent about 90% of the questions that get asked, it’s the 10% of other questions that will help you grow your business and explode your profits!

The other questions deal with building your business, and positioning it for long term growth.

At the root of it,
Succeeding in internet marketing is simple and fundamental
1) Find a need.
2) Match it with a solution (could be a product/service)

Macro Issues in Internet Marketing

Most important than the ‘how do i learn HTML’ type questions are the macro or higher level considerations of your business strategy.

Your business strategy works as a business plan or blueprint to help you identify what you should or should not be doing.
It also goes into how you should be doing it.

If done correctly, your business plan will give you the answers to the questions you might be wondering about – like how do I select a partner, how much should i budget for my expenses and how much you should charge for your products, which offers or products should i promote.

Your business blueprint will drive what you do and when you’re stuck or you’re wondering about the next action you should take, it determines which of the tiny pieces of blog or affiliate or seo or ppc tools and software you will need.

I want to give you 5 important factors to take note of as you’re building your business this year.

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1) TRUST

If you’ve dealt with a bank, insurance provider, realtor or another service provider who’s serious about building a long term relationship, you’ll notice that they will spend time to get to know you and what you’re about. If they were to try to force you to buy something the first time you met, it would seriously damage or even kill the relationship.

A significant part of the success I experienced in my business last year was due to the network i built up and the relationships and contacts i had made.

Spend a moment to think about the people you consider your good friends, and the people you do business with.
what is it that makes you trust them?

How would you bring those values and attitudes into your business?

Consciously or unconsciously, we buy from people we like and we trust.

As an internet marketer and as an affiliate,
promotion doesn’t always need to be something that you’re an affiliate or something you own. Might be a free resource.
You may not benefit from it, but your audience could stand to benefit greatly from.

Take a look at the products that prominent marketers like Wil Reynolds, Shawn Collins, Geordie Carswell, Sam Harrelson talk about and mention on their blogs.

Aaron Wall provides a number of free equivalents for products which other marketers are charging hundreds of dollars for, in a list of resources in his SEO Book. His intention is to help you grow your business and that builds trust.

Build trust.

You might recommend something free today, but if you build up your social goodwill bank (refer to blog post), you will reap the rewards later.

*** on a strong, reliable and trusted recommendation, conversions can be higher than 50%.

2) PATIENCE
If you plant a seed today, do you expect a tree tomorrow?

Why have the same expectation for your business?

It’s going to take time.

Drop the make instant money idea, and focus on long term, steady business.

Yes, i have helped generate 5-figure and 6-figure paydays in the course of my marketing efforts,
but nothing beats taking time to build a business which provides steady income

Normally, you can’t start a business today and expect it to generate 100,000 next month.
99% of the time, it doesn’t work that way.

In general any business needs time to build momentum.

Momentum is like moving a huge rock, it’s tough to get it moving, but once it starts going, it’s not easy to stop it.

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3) KNOWLEDGEABLE / SUBJECT EXPERT
Too many affiliates and sometimes product owners are creating products or promoting products they know nothing about.

Going through a couple of sales pages, and reading wikipedia doesnt make you a niche specialist.

–The trend is that for high value offers especially, in the range of $50-more than 100 per lead or sale, EPCs can sometimes be in the single digit dollar range. this means that a lot of affiliates are flinging offers at their traffic like throwing mud on a wall and hoping something sticks.

no surprise that conversions will be sub 1%, and could hover near zero

Consumers with the most troublesome, horrible and life-crippling problems will have the biggest wallets.
If you’re in such a position, you’d want to get the best doctor or professional to take care of your problem, not someone who learned root canal surgery out of an ebook!

if you’re going to do something important like debt consolidation or mortgage refinancing, you’re likely to trust a solid and credible finance content website, rather than some guy who shot some spam emails into your email inbox.

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4) Shift From QUICK BUCK TO LONG TERM MENTALITY
systems are geared this way, pay per lead, pay per sale.

make the sale, move on the next customer

“single-sale, fire and forget, goodbye” mentality
retain customers, needs change in mindset,

going fwd, lead generation costs are going to be more expensive.
customer retention is key.

to the repeat customer mentality.

like popular blog or community site, have customers coming back a couple of times a week.
if really popular, come back every day.

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5) FUN
Have a vested interest

Have a personal stake.
***This is the most important factor

some progs are going to pay 75% of sale value, in some cases, get payouts of 150% of the sale value.

I have had offers to promote products with double and triple the normal affiliate payouts, but didn’t take it up.

You’re not going to do well if your heart is not in it.

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Bottom Line:

A lot of doomsayers are saying that Internet Marketing is getting harder is harder, blogging is getting harder and harder, Google slaps are making it more difficult to rank in the search engines, escalating PPC prices are going to kick all the new PPC affiliates out of the market.

They usually say this just before they promote their product which is going to get rid of all these problems for $97!

What a bargain!

To borrow a phrase from Shawn Collins’, here’s the real deal…

It doesn’t take a genius to succeed in internet marketing, while there’re a number of guys with PhDs, there’re also many marketers who didn’t complete high school.

You don’t always need book smarts to succeed in internet marketing, but you need to be smart enough to have a long term focus on building your business on a solid foundation.

Signing up for the RevenueWire Affiliate Portal means you have free access to a conversion tracker, split tester and probably the most important for new affliate marketers, a comprehensive PPC tutorial, including keyword/keyphrase strategies, biddding strategies and measures to deal with Google’s Quality Score.

It’s quite a useful resource.

Related:

–> Copeac CPA Network

–> Wealth Ninja Affiliate Marketing Guide

–> AzoogleAds CPA Network