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.

–

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.

Using the power of outsourcing and delegating, and creating a system/framework to better run your business and personal life, the ultimate goal of the 4 hour workweek is to work just 4 hours a week.

Top affiliate Jeremy Palmer had written that he had been working as many as 80 hours a week since May while working simultaneously on his affiliate campaigns and putting together his groundbreaking affiliate training program, the Black Ink Project 2. Not to mention the new version of his Optimize My Site software.

So is it possible for a successful business owner to work just 4 hours a week, especially those who’re active practising affiliates, rather than mere book or ebook authors?

It boils down to a couple of principles that you need to master if you’re going to cut down your time commitment to your business AND grow it simultaneously.

Here’s 3 steps to getting started:

• You can’t avoid SOME gruntwork: There’re some things that can be outsourced and some elements that just cannot. What you should be doing yourself: developing the basic concept, refining it, optimizing it. Negotiating and networking with likely partners and distributors to collaborate on the project or distribute once it’s ready. There’s some degree of legwork involved in it, especially if you want to put out a quality product or service.
• Be award of financial ratios: The biggest challenge in creating a $1 million business is letting go of the $10/hour jobs. Unless you like it, consider outsourcing almost everything (aside from the “gruntwork” mentioned above). The only way your business can be made autonomous is if you make yourself redundant/obsolete. Go for a 1 month holiday and if the business is running without you (aside from a few brief cellphone calls and emails), you’re doing ok.
• Always be scaling: In the sales world, sales guru Tom Hopkins has the says “Always Be Selling”. As a business owner, you need a paradigm shift to think about how to continually scale your business, and harnessing the power of passive income. This may mean creating more products and services where your personal presence isn’t required, this may mean creating a second tier of consultants or specialists who can deal with your customers, instead of them having to come to you all the time (even if they’re paying you $10,000 or $100,000 a month). If you’re focused on growing your business AND maintaining the same level of service quality, you’re poised for phenomenal growth. My friend Amit Mehta has mastered this skill and it’s interested to see how his business runs pretty autonomously.

Although I shouldn’t have been that surprised, still it’s quite amazing how different their approaches are from each other. Which goes to show that there are multiple avenues to achieve your goals with PPC and affiliate marketing.

Note: I’ll be painting in broad strokes here, so expect some generalizations.

(left-to-right) Jeremy Palmer, Amit Mehta, John Hasson

Jeremy Palmer is a name that comes up often, especially if you’re a Commission Junction (CJ) affiliate or if you attend the Affiliate Summit. I’ve found that Jeremy and I use a similar approach in looking at offline research avenues, including books, magazines and reports to research niches, and develop deep, content rich sites.

Given his experience as a web developer, I guess it’s not surprising that he tends to build sites from the ground up. Also, having presented and watched his Black Ink project unfold, I’ve seen how Jeremy uses a systematic approach to building his campaigns.

You can check out Jeremy’s appearance on the Friday Podcast.

–

Amit Mehta has spoken at the past 3 Affiliate Summits, and given his background as a researcher at MIT’s Lincoln Labs, it’s not suprising how he has a rigorous process to set up keywords and test them. In particular, his PPC optimization process and use of statistics, as well as split-test are among his strongest competitive edge.

Not forgetting that Amit’s quite the “mindset” man in my book (You would not expect anything less from someone who blogs at the SuperAffiliateMindset.com blog). His mental attitude and “inner game” skills sets him apart from many affiliates. Also, his business acumen and ability to scale his business through team building and outsourcing are pretty impressive.

You can check out Amit’s recent appearance on the Friday Podcast.

–

John Hasson might not be a name that you are familiar with, unless you’ve attended the last 2 Affiliate Summits where John has spoken at. With his background as a programmer/developer, I was very impressed at the level of automation and scripting that John uses in his PPC campaigns.

Having developed a number of shareware applications and his experience as a Microsoft .Net developer gives him an edge, especially when it comes to interfacing with merchant and affiliate networks APIs and backend systems.

John came out with a number of great insights, especially for new affiliates.

Stay tune for John’s appearance on this week’s Friday Podcast (coming out on Friday!)

I am a little surprised and disappointed that several core Twitter features have been disabled in the interim.

The loss of private messaging I can live without (for the short term), but what happens when you are handicapped in your ability to follow conversations?

Witness the page for Jeremy Palmer’s Black Ink Project:

The pages show the twits originating from Jeremy, but the “With others” tab which you could click on and see the 2-way conversation is now missing.

If you want to track the conversation, you’d have to hit the “in reply to” hyperlink.

[At least that’s how I remember how I used to track conversations…]

So if you’d like to follow an active Twitter user, you’d be hitting the “in reply to” link pretty often and opening up a bunch of windows and study the timestamps and figure out the chronological sequences.

I may be wrong, but I thought the purpose of these technologies was to make things easier, rather than give me some weird sudoku-like puzzle to figure out what goes where?

–

Having installed the latest version of the Flock social web browser (based on the Mozilla code, which Firefox is based from), I noticed that there’s an integrated Twitter module.

Take a look at the left column:

I can imagine the amount of resource load this is going to cause to Twitter’s servers via the API as updates are pulled up from all the people I’m following…

Together with other Twitter API intensive apps like Tweetscan, is it any wonder why Twitter is being continually brought to its knees?

Here’s an idea… why not restore full functionality to the Twitter’s web interface and block off or severely restrict API access to a couple of trusted sites, or impose quota on them?

Better yet, charge for CPU processing units or API calls like on an ASP model?

Content IS valuable, and Twitter parceling out data on a no-hold-barred basis is going to result in ridiculous quality of service, destroying its reputation in the interim.

Remember how ridiculous MySpace used to be when it was popular? It could take 2 minutes for profile to load (if I didn’t get timed out). I certainly hope we’re not going to see Twitter turn into MySpace 2.0!

If it’s any consolation, Facebook has been facing similar growing pains too, with the “white screen of death” being a familiar refrain among certain segments of FB users.

–

So here’s an interesting idea.

Instead of continually looking at ways to scale your server farm, move onto a distributed/grid computing model, why not look at a viable model of operating the business? Charging for API access if needed?

Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time available, in the hard disk context – data expands to fill the available storage. Similarly in the social network context, resource demand will balloon up to eat all available resources alive.

If the overcapacity fix is a technology-based one, rather than a systematic, business-oriented decision, we’ll have to be content with seeing this fella around:

Especially if you’ve been traditionally focusing on PPC or Search Engine Optimization to generate leads and sales, these strategies can give you a couple more tools for your arsenal.

Social marketing is all about open communication and visibility. (transparency and honesty are key too).

If you don’t already have an online presence, look at how you want to position yourself.

At the heart of it, a Dell computer, an Apple iPod or an Asus Eee PC is just a bunch of circuit boards and electronic chips soldered together and encased in an aluminum or polycarbonate case. It’s marketing magic that imbues these objects with the emotional associations of style, ease-of-use, prestige, etc.

In his book, “All Marketers are Liars”, Seth Godin mentions how consumers are actually the ones lying to themselves. They imbue products and services with these larger-than-life characteristics and spending their income on “driving machines” and believe that a computer can help them “think different”.

If you’re an online marketer and you aren’t already picking up these tips to up your game, you could be missing out on the massive leverage these strategies provide.

Pickup artists like Neil Strauss AKA Style, Erik Von Markovik AKA Mystery talk about creating personas or social avatars. I don’t see this as very different from a brand that a company creates.

One question might be asked “So, how do I create my identity if I’m new to this?”

Answer: Create your identity based on what you want to be (your outcome) and strive towards it. An avatar is your desired outcome, you build it as a goal you want to achieve.

Having it consistent with your personal thoughts, values and attitudes will help you market via social media and web 2.0 with authenticity and brutal effectiveness. Projecting a picture of yourself as something you’re not is going to be a fruitless exercise down the road.

The pickup artists have put a practical application to Robert Cialdini’s concept of social proof – the idea of DHV’s or Demonstration of Higher Value. In Internet marketer speak, that’s becoming an authority site in your niche. (ok, I’m extending the concept further from its original position).

More importantly, social marketing still represents a pool of huge untapped potential – something like the Excalibur buried in a block of stone. The secret here is that anyone can be the “King Arthur” that pulls it out and unleashes its potential – it’s a matter of stepping up and taking action.

This clip with one of Mystery’s lieutenants, JDog, address the issue of creating avatars. Read between the lines and the same principles of focus, rather than “peacocking” will equally apply in your business too.

I’d expand it to encompass taking on a network role in the merchant-affiliate equation too.

I don’t think any of the roles are necessarily “better”, because all the parts help to complete the system.

Trying to come to the conclusion that one is “better” than the other is like saying a car engine is more important than the tires. In that case, take off one of the tires and try driving off.

I’ve had the opportunity to take up roles in all 3 positions, and its been an educational experience.

I identify with the points several of the affiliates raised about not having to deal with customers, refunds, frustration, etc. At the same time too, once you have several products development cycles and product launches under your belt, and you create systems to deal with not only problems, but solutions at enhancing your business competitiveness, you bring your business to a new level.

I personally like being in the product owner/merchant role, because I like building things (probably partly due to my engineer roots), and having a brand is going to be one of the strongest unique selling propositions (USPs) as affiliate marketing, and the online marketing industry matures in general.

Part of being a successful merchant lies in having realistic expectations.

Here are a couple of my personal experiences:

• Refund rate: Expect a variable rate from 5% to 20%, depending on the quality of your product. The quality of the leads being generated play a part too.
• Customer service expectations: You can’t expect to provide a high ticket item, without providing some sort of customer service. Including starter guides, FAQs to go with your product somewhat mitigates the need for heavy duty customer service, but you will still need some element of support. If you’re being crushed by the weight of email support, why not use an online help desk, customer support ticketing system, or work with outsourcers like AgentsOfValue?
• Low Overall Margins: Jeremy brought up a good point that during the launch of PPC Classroom, unexpected developments pummelled the margins of the product. Having managed a company involved in offline manufacturing , I’d say that online product development is a fraction of what brick-and-mortar manufacturing costs. Just a mould can cost upwards of $20,000. But the advantage is once the prototyping and proof-of-concept capital expenses are incurred, the second and future manufacturing runs are vastly cheaper. In the case of a proven info product, I bet the second and third versions of an established product will be vastly more profitable.

From what I’ve seen, the vast majority of affiliate marketers continue to focus on generating leads and selling those leads to CPA and affiliate networks.

By focusing merely on the front end (or lead acquisition) side of things, you are essentially a traffic arbitrager – acquiring traffic at an inexpensive cost and reselling this traffic to the networks – pocketing the difference as your profit.

Only about 10% of affiliates (typically in the Super Affiliate category) are actively building their brand. The brand can be used to leverage and launch new verticals, or be sold to a larger company or even a venture capitalist or brought to the public markets if it achieves critical mass.

While it’s great to generate immediate profits, staying in the industry long term also requires making some long term plans.

Because of the BlackInkProject, I’d been waking at 5am (later rolled back to 545am) to make it for his live affiliate training (3pm PDT is 6am in Singapore…)

If you’re already an affiliate marketing veteran, what you’ll take away from Jeremy’s lessons is not what he says on the surface, but also “what lies beneath”. Look beyond the surface and you’ll get an insight into how he strategizes his system, develops a process and applies that process with ruthless efficiency when approaching a new niche.

So if you’re on the forums asking “I want to start a shoe blog, I hear they make good money. How do I start?” you’re probably barking down the wrong track.

Instead, take a moment to map out your goals/outcomes, develop a plan of action and be prepared to change course along the way.

As someone who made it to the sophomore year as an EE/CS (electrical engineers, computer science) major before dropping out and making a minor switch to creative writing and psychology, I’d like to think that one thing I’ve carried over from my 2 years of engineering is a systems-based approach to building a business.

Which totally echoes what Scott Jangro mentioned during the recording of our Friday Podcast session.

If you haven’t read between the lines in the affiliate and internet marketing blogs out there, and go beyond the “make quick cash” ebooks you see being flouted and touted and pimped all over the place, you’ll see a trend towards building a business online. And it’s no “big shock” or suprise either.

If you look back historically at the first salesmen selling snake oil and other miracle cures, they were soon supplanted by guys who were the real deal.

Do you think the online world is going to play by different laws?

So just like the dotcom crash of 2000 wiped out the guys who had $5 million in VC money and were buying BMWs and Hermann Miller Aeron chairs for everyone, including the janitor, the real world economy soon gave them a slap in the face and showed them the door.

With internet marketing, we’ve seen the rise and decline of keyword stuffed single page “affiliate sites”, crazy Google Cash-style direct linking campaigns, and in the last 2 years, squidoo lenses and blogger blogs stuffed with scraped content.

I think there’s a definite trend towards building a branded viable site, along the lines of what Kim Rowley is building, where you have a clearly identified personality like a Gary Vee fronting the site, rather than a hidden site owner, sitting behind an obscure and often cryptic “about us” page.

I was pretty surprised that Scott talked pretty extensively about his costume site which he’d mentioned a number of times in the earlier episodes of his Jangrocast podcast (he’s got good music taste, he recently swapped the intro/outro music from the FatboySlim remix of A Tribe Called Quest’s I left my wallet in El Segundo to something equally cool), and Jeremy just mentioned that Scott is probably the biggest costumes affiliate out on the internet.

But if you’ve learned one lesson from their books, it’s that copying their sites and expecting the same results is just like cloning a MacDonald’s and expecting the same results.

To paraphrase a popular phrase, “It’s the system, stupid!”

Check out the BlackInkProject and watch for Scott Jangro’s appearance on the Friday Podcast this Friday.

It takes a lot to get me out of bed early in the morning, but Jeremy Palmer’s Black Ink Project kicked off to a great start today.

Jeremy talked about his start in affiliate marketing and the niches he’s in (dating, web hosting, music downloads, VOIP, online marketing), as well as criteria for shortlisting and testing viable niches.

More importantly, he also talked about a number of niches he “failed” at and eventually dropped.

If you’re not already generating a 5-figure income from your affiliate marketing efforts, you ought to sign up for Jeremy’s 20 session, free (yes…it’s free) training at the Black Ink Project.

I’ll be presenting content later in the series, and as the program picks up steam, I know that more than a few Super Affiliates are going to come out of this program.

The first week of training kicked off at 3pm PDT and continues the rest of the week.

Check out the full schedule and register at: Black Ink Project (limited spaces available).

The call recordings may be available 24 hours after the initial session.

Also, find out more about Jeremy Palmer’s strategies from his appearance on a recent episode of the Friday Podcast.

Note: US and Canadian BlackInkProject members have a toll-free number to call in. I made a long distance call, but it’s great to find out that webinar provider WebEx (a Cisco company) is providing real-time audio stream too.

Out of every 10 new start-ups every year, 5 of them will go belly-up in the first year.

Out of the survivors making it past year 1, another 50% of them will cease operations at the end of year 2.

And so on, until only the top 1% make it at the end of year 5.

[The stats are across all industries and according to the company registrars that help these companies and sole proprietorships incorporate]

I don’t exactly know the stats for individuals coming into internet marketing, but I think it could be something similar.

A case in point, I’ve helped sell coaching programs, where we work 1-on-1 with new internet marketers, or people who say they want to make a living on the internet. These guys shell out close to $10,000 a head to enroll in these programs. They’re all fired up in week 1, just raring to go.

You ask them to research 5 websites, they research 50. But somehow when it comes to implementing the project later in the program, there’s some resistance and inertia to getting started.

Some may blame “affluenza” or middle class syndrome. If there isn’t an inner fire to succeed, it’s going to be difficult for anything to happen.

One saying that I’ve been telling new marketers is “If you do nothing, nothing will happen. If you do something, something (which may not be what you expect) will happen”.

The inner game – inside your head – is ultimately going to affect your outer game (what you do).

And everyone has had some experience with “structured procrastination” – “I don’t know if it’s really me” , “I’m not sure if this is going to be a meaningful project”, “I don’t know how I feel about this” or [insert your favorite excuse/reason here].

So in life, there’re going to be the people who sit and do nothing. Then there are the people who go out and do something. And the third group who sit there and blog about it.

Which group do you want to be in?

I was just looking at the updates for Jeremy Palmer’s BlackInkProject which we discussed in the last Friday Podcast. Out of the 1,000 people who signed up (the program closed within 24 hours), 759 have filled in the survey…In order words, 24.1% or about a quarter of the people haven’t taken action yet.

If you can’t take 5 minutes to fill in a survey, imagine the inertia to get your first campaign going…

Incidentally, Jeremy has opened up a BlackInkProject wait list and there is a possibility he might be opening up more places.

My budyd, Amit Mehta’s also put up a blog about the value of persistence worth checking out.

If there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s that you need to climb over the walls to get to the big rewards. If you can’t even get over the small wall to get to the next level, success is going to be a long time in the making.

While I was huffing and puffing on Sunday manhandling my heavy desk and moving the computer, monitors and bunches of cables around, I was listening to the huge backlog of MP3s I had downloaded over the past couple of weeks.

I probably listened to about 10 hours of audio over the weekend and was more active than usual in my twitter stream too.

I think it’s important to use your “downtime” well, especially if you’re working on your taxes, cleaning the desk, clearing your inbox (snail mail and email), or sorting out your baseball card collection (or samurai katana collection if that’s up your alley).

Here’s my list of favorite podcasts at the moment:

#1: Geekcast (the podcast, not the network…) -  A collaboration between Shawn Collins, Sam Harrelson, Lisa Picarille and Jim Kukral, I’d classify it as a industry banter session. I can identify with Lisa’s sentiment that it seems unstructured at times, but I think it’s part of the fun, especially as the show hosts go off on each other.

There was some drama recently as Shawn and Sam had a spat with Jim, but all seems well now, and we should have the 4 musketeers back in the seat. The show is recorded every Tues and Sam usually has the podcast up within 24 hours.

Be sure to check out the “Sorry, Jangro” drinking game that accompanies the podcast.

#2: Affiliate Summit Sessions Podcast: If you missed the recent Affiliate Summit West, or even if you attended, you probably wouldn’t have had an opportunity to attend every session as there were 4 simultaneous sessions with many great sessions in the same time slot. I enjoyed listening to the “How To Futureproof Your SEO Efforts” by Wil Reynolds, the video innovation panel chaired by Buy.TV’s Melissa Salas, the social media panel chaired by Sam, the super affiliate panel with Kris Jones, Zac Johnson, Amit Mehta and John Chow, the ABestWeb panel….I haven’t had a chance to listen to all the sessions yet, but there’s quite a hoard of great content there.

You might also like to check out the editorial panel I appeared on.

#3: Affiliate Fortune Cookies: A 5-day a week podcast from Sam, it’s his take on Lost, science fiction, social media, affiliate marketing and whatever else comes to mind. As Sam mentions, it’s intended to be a personal podcast and you can kind of hear his existential angst, especially when it comes to affiliate marketing/internet marketing in recent episodes.

Those are my top 3 podcasts at the moment, given the limited time I spend sitting and listening to podcasts.

You might also like to check out Shawn and Lisa’s Affiliate Thing podcast on Webmaster Radio, Linda Woods’ Affiliate Marketing Insider also on WMR. They’re other podcasts on the Geekcast network.

Another resource I highly recommend are the past episodes of Affiliate Marketing Today, especially the episodes hosted by AbestWeb owner Haiko De Poel and the later season hosted by Jeremy Palmer. These sessions provide a great foundation in affiliate marketing for new marketers.

I keep hearing that GarageBand is a great software suite for podcasting on the Mac, and I might fire up my new MacBook to test it out soon.

Also on the cards is a live podcast via Skype’s SkypeCast service one of these days when I have a little more time on my hands.

Jeremy talked about his affiliate marketing strategies and gave tips for new affiliates entering the industry.

Hear from this veteran about on topics like:

• Tips to get started in affiliate marketing
• Should you promote offers from affiliate networks, CPA networks or direct merchant offers
• Take a look at some of Jeremy’s successful affiliate sites (FreeBudgetingSoftware, TrySuperPass and AudioBookHub)
• Why you should get a few seasonal campaigns up
• Sources to do your affiliate research
• And Jeremy’s soon-to-be-released BlackInkProject

You should also check out Jeremy’s Quit Your Day Job blog.

Check out the podcast below:

>>> The Black Ink Project

If you’ve checked into an affiliate or CPA network control panel, you’ll typically see a “Super Affiliate” or “sub-affiliate recruitment” link with payouts ranging from about 1% to 2% of commissions generated and if you’re lucky, you’ll sometimes see 5% or 10%.

At those levels, is there any real incentive to go out and recruit affiliates/publishers for your network, aside from wanting to build goodwill and possibly a couple of bucks for a nice Friday night dinner?

I understand that margins can be pretty thin, especially since a number of CPA networks are the ultimate traffic arbitragers – they “buy” traffic from you at $1-$1.50 per zip/email submit lead, and attempt to upsell them into an affiliate offer or merchant-direct offer on the backend.

Granted, I haven’t seen the financials of one of these networks yet, but I’m wondering that if you are already relying on affiliates to generate your sales…why not go the extra mile and incentivize them to go out and recruit more affiliates for you? Especially with a decent payout. (we’re not even considering networks which pay you $3 or $5 to recruit an affiliate…).

By my estimations, one out of every 100 affiliates is a top performer (hence the term “top performer”), in this league, you’ll see guys like: Amit Mehta, Ralph “Ruck” Ruckman, Zac Johnson, Bobby “bluebobbo”, Jeremy Palmer, James Martell , Paul “Uber Affiliate” Bourque among others.

But I think the game of getting top affiliates is like going out on a fishing boat. You cast your nets and get a whole bunch of prospective affiliates, but you won’t know who’ll be a top performer until you haul in your catch and sort everyone out.

On that basis, the less-skilled affiliates will weed themselves out and a higher payout won’t matter anyway. On the other hand, a better performing affiliate will be motivated to go out and get results.

I think the bottomline is that in building a network with a long-term business focus, it’s inevitable that you’ll want to have your stakeholders – affiliates who are consciously producing for you, to go out there and evangelize for you too. And it’s going to take more than 1%, 2% or 3% to get them excited…

Oh and another thing, if sub-affiliate recruitment is a focus for any network, why aren’t sub-affiliate recruitment links included at the bottom of each mailing or offer update?

It’d seem like something easy to implement and would bump your recruitment efforts by an easy 5-10% with no additional marketing effort…

Yes it’s going to be a 24+ hour flight, and it’s during the peak season where it was absolute murder to get my ticket.

But well worth it…

PPC Classroom Live is the live workshop component to Anik and Jeremy’s PPC Classroom product.

Here’s a taste of the Super Affiliate lineup:

(Left-to-right) Mark Widawer, Ros Gardner, Greg Cesar, Anik Singal, Amit Mehta, Jeremy Palmer, Kirt Christensen, David Bullock

Certainly worth flying all the way there for a couple of days (the event is on December 1-2 in Vegas).

For some affiliates who’re new to the industry and trying their luck, affiliate marketing can be a gamble…

Especially if you don’t have a system in place and aren’t proficient at tracking and optimizing your affiliate campaigns…

But not if you can learn firsthand from the veterans.

There’re a number of tickets left at the promotional price of $297, and if you’re headed over, do stop by and say hi!

–> PPC Classroom Live!

“I see several options to run web advertising on my websites, and it looks very easy compared to affiliate marketing. Wouldn’t it be easier to make money this way?”

–

That’s a good question.

Your internet income is determined by your effort.

The level of engagement (the time and effort you put into your marketing efforts) generally determines the type of return you get.

Here’s a listing of different monetization techniques with payouts listed from lower returns to higher returns:

Web advertising -> CPA (cost per action) marketing -> pay per sale (or what’s traditionally known as affiliate marketing) -> product creation

Web advertising refers to programs like the Google AdSense publisher program, Yahoo Search Marketing ads, WidgetBucks or programs like Chitika and Kontera.

I’ve found that web advertising generally provides a low rate of return UNLESS you pick a very hot niche, for example Transformers (during the launch of the movie), or perhaps a Batman-themed site in conjunction with the next movie. A “Gears of Wars” niche site for the XBox360 game wouldn’t do too shabbily either.

You’d probably know that all it takes to get paid is to have your visitors click on the ads.

Your payouts generally range from $0.05 per click and can go up to about $10 per click.

–

CPA Marketing provides a higher payout, however, the level of engagement is higher too.

In many cases the “Action” element in “Cost Per Action” involves submitting their name and email address, or requesting for information, or paying a nominal fee for a product.

Beyond just being a publisher, you need to have some marketing knowledge to create an incentive for visitors to complete the offer. More importantly, you need to know how to select offers that will convert.

Payouts generally range from $0.50 per action and can go up to $100 per lead.

There’s several affiliate networks you can join to check out CPA offers. I’ll update my resources page with a number of them.

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Affiliate marketing requires active marketing on your part because you’re paid a commission only when the prospect buys the product or service. It’s also known as performance-based marketing.

With physical products (like a TV or computer or furniture), the commission generally ranges between 2% and 15% of the product price.

With digital products (eg. ebooks, podcasts, certain types of DVDs, home study courses), it can range between 50% to 75%. In some cases, the payout can hit 100%.

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With product creation, you’d invest a one-time effort to develop the product, then decide how you want to market it. You could either market it yourself and keep all the profits, or recruit affiliate marketers to promote it, or run a PPC campaign and recruit publishers to run your advertising.

Beyond just “creating a product”, the key skills needed include being able to conduct market research, assessing product demand, managing product development, planning your marketing strategy, setting up your order fulfilment infrastructure, executing the campaign and customer service. If you’re a newer marketer, you might want to gain experience as an affiliate before trying this.

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Your first assumption might be that everyone should be an affiliate marketer for digital products.

It can be immensely successful provided you’re willing to invest time to understand your market and create the appropriate marketing campaign.

Most newbies will create a blog or website, do a product review along the lines of “Is Product XYZ a scam? Read this review to find out” then drop their affiliate link in there.

There’s many problems with this approach [which I might go into in a later post] that it will not work for many newbies.

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The bottomline is that if you’re totally green to Internet Marketing, you might want to start off with web advertising, and gradually move up to CPA marketing and affiliate marketing.

If you’ve already had some experience under your belt, you might like to check out my Wealth Ninja affiliate marketing product, or Anik Singal and Jeremy Palmer’s PPC Classroom.

Here’s my response to this Monday Question:



Monday Question - PPC Vs Blogging And Free Traffic - The best bloopers are a click away


While blogging and free traffic continue to generate 90-95% of the traffic (with SEO traffic making up the balance), like any business owner, I’m looking at ways to grow my business and increase sales and profits.

PPC is certainly a good prospect, which is why I’m promoting PPC Classroom. It comes from 2 credible Internet marketers, Jeremy Palmer and Anik Singal, and I’ve had a chance to take a look at the product. The next phase is putting it into action.

That’s one of the reasons I’m joining together with PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta to work on a number of PPC projects.

Besides PPC, I’ve been exploring eBay as a source of traffic and monetization, as well as a SEO project with former blackhat SEO-turned-Web2.0 specialist Howie Schwartz. More on that later this week.