“Hi Andrew,

I’m an affiliate marketer and have been having success with my affiliate marketing efforts, I use PPC and free traffic means (primarily articles) to generate leads.

Lately, my sales have been stagnating…

How can I ensure more stability in my affiliate income?

Thanks.
Josh”

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My answer:

Having worked with a number of Internet marketing veterans, I’ve noticed a couple of best business practises that I’ve seen these successful and experienced marketers use.

• The Micromanaging trap

There’s the Internet marketers “day trader” mentality that you’d want to avoid.

It’s something I used to do when I first started out – typically seen in behavior like staying logged in to your affiliate account all day and hitting the refresh button every hour to see if more sales have come in.

If you’ve looked at how stock day traders work, they’re like human rats sitting in front of their computers, waiting for the stock to go up (or down) 1 or 2 “ticks” (bids) and doing a buy or sell order. This isn’t any way to run a business and you’d be chaining yourself to your computer.

If it’s a new campaign, you might want to check in once or twice a day.

If you’ve planned a campaign well, you can set it to run on autopilot and tweak it every day or 2 days.

• Regularity and consistency

It’s important to distinguish between revenue generating and non-revenue generating activity.

Some marketers who spend more time writing ebooks than actually practising what they preach might give you advice that is highly suspect. Do your own testing and tracking.

I have heard one highly experienced marketer suggest that you write and submit 20 articles to the major article directories and wait for the cash to come in.

From actual practise, I’ve found that it pays to submit enough articles to establish a presence in your niche area (maybe 5-10 articles), then drip feed another 2-3 articles every week. This ensures that your traffic is more regular. (imagine the analogy of subscribing to a newspaper and getting 50-60 issues in a single day, versus getting an issue every day…it’s pretty much common sense, isn’t it?)

• Testing and tracking

You need to be able to analyze the data your sites are generating and go beyond just gathering a bunch of keywords from Google Analytics, awstats, MyBlogLog Pro Stats, or whatever other analytics package you are using.

You need to intelligently put together a picture of your visitor profile, track where they’re coming from, and put together new traffic mechanisms, whether a new PPC ad group, to test that new channel.

If anything, I think a lot of new marketers fall prey to the idea that you can just set up a PPC campaign, let it run on autopilot, never touch it again and expect cash to come flowing in….nothing could be further from the truth.

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So your success in affiliate marketing has to walk a fine line between getting the urge to micromanage and fiddle with your campaigns every 5 mins, and the other extreme of setting it up, never doing further follow up and expecting something of a miracle.

Following the mantra of “test, track, test, track” will bring your campaigns to the next level.

If you haven’t yet, take some time to read his “About Ruck” page and more importantly, his post “What Led Me To Believe I Could Work Online Fulltime“. It’s certainly worth spending some time reading the post, and more importantly archiving it for reference.

Are you an Iron Man?

If you were to look inside yourself, do you know if Internet Marketing is in your blood?

Or is it merely one of the hobbies like network marketing, forex, options trading, eBay that has recently come into your “biz op inbox”?

Here’s what the ebooks don’t typically teach you…

You need to have a driving force inside you. A little voice that pushes you on at 2am when you’re rushing to put a site up.

A hidden, subsconscious need to be the best, to be number 1.

If that’s lacking, all the goals you’ve written, to be a millionaire, to buy that dream home, to go on that trip around the world is just going to be a mission statement you’ve written on a sheet of paper that you carry around in your wallet all day.

It’s not what happens when things are easy that determine the path you’ve chosen for yourself, it’s what happens when things get tough…really tough…

What happens when the going gets tough?

When you encounter difficulty, are you likely to fight, take flight or freeze?

Do you say to yourself “How do I get out of this one?” or do you instead ask yourself “How do I overcome this challenge?”

The questions you ask yourself, determines the answers you will get, and ultimately the quality of your life.

Are you sitting in a cave alone in the dark?

It’s easy to forget that you have the most powerful tool, even greater than the most powerful computer in the world, at your disposal…It lies between your ears.

Creativity and imagination open up your options. It worked for Einstein and it’ll work for you too.

When you hear “mind over matter”, the reason why marketers fail is because their mind has given up before it’s addressed the matter at hand.

Sure, there will be skeptics who post pithy comments like “it won’t work” or lazy ones who ask “Why don’t you do a campaign from start-to-finish and post every step you take in detail”. If you did that, however, there’s no guarantee it’d work, much less get anything near the same level of results.

What the books, and what the courses don’t and probably won’t ever capture, is that fact that highly successful people will have the deep hunger to succeed. It’s something that might come naturally, it could be something due to environmental factors, but if anything else, it will be the biggest factor in your success…

If you are ready to be inspired by one man’s success, here’s a PDF I rendered of his blog post:

–> What Led Me To Believe I Could Work Online Fulltime by Ruck

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Iron Man movie images courtesy of Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment

Here’s a shot of my blog stats stats from awstats (awesome web stats), the analytics program which comes with my Bluehost web account.

On a month-on-month basis, the stats are increasing from Jan to hit a high in May.

Yet Alexa reports:

A high in January, then plunge in April and a further plunge in June.

I’ve checked a number of sites too and their ratings seem to have dipped quite significantly.

It could be due to getting more traffic from visitors who don’t install the Alexa toolbar on their computers. But assuming the people with Alexa on their machines continue to visit your website, why should the stats continue to drop?

If you’re using your statistics in planning your traffic campaign, you might want to take Alexa’s rankings with a pinch of salt and go with awstats or Google Analytics instead.

Speaking to an affiliate or super affiliate (generally referring to someone who makes at least $10,000 in profit from affiliate marketing) is hands-down the best way. You get to ask your question, get an answer, ask a follow up question and get an answer almost immediately.

Another solution is to gain information via an information product. This being Internet Marketing, your first inclination might be towards ebooks, but take note that this category also includes videos, DVDs, audio CDs and printed magazines and books. The depth of information might not be as comprehensive as talking to someone face-to-face, or maybe over an instant messenger or email, but what you lack in personalized attention is more than made up by the breadth of information available.

A third avenue is through forums and blogs. It can be a mess out there, sorting out the good forums and blogs from the great ones. But typically if the site has many visitors, a high PageRank (indicative of a good number of links and backlinks) and most importantly the reputation and buzz about the place, it’s likely to be a good source of information.

As forum and blog posts tend to be fairly episodic and ‘bite-sized’, you will have to spend a little more effort in pieceing together the information.

But taking all 3 methods in tandem, you’ll find your knowledge increasing rapidly.

The most significant factor in your development as an affiliate marketer lies in your ability to put your knowledge into action. Knowing is not enough, it’s the doing which brings in the dollars.

If you’re looking for a forum with a condusive atmosphere with a helpful administration and moderator team, you should check out the: 5 Star Affiliate Forum

If you’ve listened to the past episode in which 5 Star founder Linda Buquet was featured, you’d know that she’s a great resource and I was pleasantly surprised that she posted a reply to my forum post within a couple of minutes (It was about 2am her time I think).

Check out the: 5 Star Affiliate Forum

People keep asking me why I say that 90% of Internet Marketers drop out of the industry within 6 months.

The truth is I don’t have a fixed answer, but on bad days, it seems like everyone else who started out about the same time as me has moved on to:

• Network marketing
• Taken up a 9-to-5 job somewhere
• Doing the “financial trading cycle” which typically involves day trading or forex or options trading

The sad part is that they inevitably hit a brick wall, then look at what I’ve achieved in the last year and comment “Gee, you’re lucky”.

That kind of stings, considering the amount of effort I’ve spent in Internet Marketing, determining a path, building bridges to other Internet Marketers (sometimes taking a 20 hour flight each way) and taking on more than what others would normally do because I want to move along the road further.

So when I hear about the aspiring Internet Marketer who hasn’t taken action because he bought a new laptop and couldn’t figure out how to use it, and didn’t know how to configure his email, it makes me sad. Very sad.

In 2 minutes I informed him that he ought to call Dell and his ISP’s toll-free number and get his problems fixed by the next day.

Allaying blame on an inanimate laptop is tantamount to scolding the gas in your car because you got into an accident. It doesn’t quite add up.

Is it a catchall and a generalization to say marketers fail because they are lazy?

I think it’s more than just laziness, however, it’s a fundamental disconnect between your current reality and your long term goal.

If you knew you were destined for greatness, and you spent the day futzing around (maybe playing online chess, or IMing your friends), who’s to blame?

And if you have $127.05 in your affiliate marketing commission account, can you truly blame the ‘system’ because it’s rigged?

Why not start looking into the mirror, and take a cold hard look.

If you’re truly doing your best and your best isn’t good enough, it might be time to consider other options.

But if you’re putting in 30 minutes a week, and loudly yelling that the system doesn’t work, then you might eventually become part of that 90% dropout statistic.

Should it be time to kick your Internet Marketing efforts up a notch?

Like they say: “Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.”

Lesson 1: Your site needs to mature

This is probably one of the harder lessons for new marketers to absorb, or mentally comprehend. You need to achieve critical content mass and have it indexed to attract either search engine traffic or social traffic.

It could be as fast as 24 hours, or as long as a month before your traffic hits ‘acceptable’ levels. [Acceptable levels could be 1,000 uniques or 10,000 or 100,000 uniques depending on your personal goal and strategies]

Lesson 2: It’s not just purely a numbers game

Traffic quantity is as important as traffic quality alone. What’s the point if you’re going to get 50,000 uniques in a day if they aren’t interested in your content? Perhaps someone inadvertedly did a redirect to your page.

Metrics like traffic quality and traffic ‘stickiness’ (measured by their repeat visits) are more indicative of your success in building a community.

Lesson 3: Search Engines – General Traffic, Social Traffic – Targeted Traffic

I admit there’s some degree of generalization here.

But when I’m new to a specific topic, I’ll google it and check out the results that come up. I’m more inclined to be a browser. My average time on a search result is probably about 30 seconds to 5 minutes.

On the other hand, when I surf through a relevant social site like an affiliate portal, my time on site is likely in the 3 minute to 30 minute range.

What’s the magic pill?

Relevence. Finding content that answers my question, which solves a problem.

Social sites provide more relevant results than the SERPs (search engine results pages) 9 times out of 10.

Granted there are a number of niche search engines focused on affiliate marketing or Internet marketing, though they tend to be geared towards selling your something, rather than building a relationship the way a social site tends to do intuitively.

The general traffic picture in my mind now is:

• Search engines give huge torrents of traffic, stickiness tends to be lower
• Social sites give fewer visitors, though they tend to stick around.

Mixing the two will be essential to your online success.

Here’s why: The whole system of Internet Marketing profits is based on effort and engagement.

Witness-

Web advertising (text links, banner ads, Adsense) has a back-of-napkin payout of about 1-10% against your time and resorces.

Comparatively, CPA (cost per action) marketing where you’re rewarded on leads taking an action (filling in a form, submitting an email address or zip code) pays about 5% to 30% return on your effort.

Affiliate marketing with payouts on completed transactions gives a payout of 10% to 90% (depending on whether it’s a physical product or digital one).

And the big kahuna is product creation with payouts of 20% to 100%, and you control the highway toll booth so to speak.

The higher payouts are proportional to customer engagement, and your efforts to profile and understand them.

With that equation clearly in mind, why would you choose to focus on lower levels of engagement with a limit to your time and resources?

I understand the often heard sentiment from new marketers to start out with “something easy”.

It’s good to wade in baby pool at the beginning of the journey, but choosing to stay in there for long periods of time, even when people have graduated to blue oceans is beyond me.

And just in case, you’re wondering about the guy who operates 1,000 blogs running adsense on them. I think the branding associated with being a super affiliate or owning your own product, far outstrips the guy with 10,000 made-for-Adsense blogs.

That’s my personal view.

The key is to have a game plan when starting out, and following the plan.

Your comfort zone and your mindset will set the pace for your eventual success in this field.