During the call, we talked about:

• How Todd started his own CPA network
• His experience in using the HasOffers affiliate network software
• Strategies for offer selection and promotion for new affiliates
• How to get accepted by CPA networks
• A walkthrough of promoting CPA offers via polls

You can check out the podcast below:

Links:

• Josh on Twitter
• TriFoxMedia CPA network

Although he’s been a full time marketer for about a year, he’s riled up and rallied a number of experienced PPC marketers on his cakes chat IRC channel.

Inviting him to the Friday Podcast, we talked about:

• How he made the moved from near full time video game player to PPC affiliate marketer.
• Tips on building up your PPC knowledge and skills
• How to get ideas for creating effective landing pages
• Three perpetually “hot” niches
• What you need to do to succeed in affiliate marketing

You can check out the Friday Podcast below:

And visit his blog: NickyCakes.

So one of the questions you’ll need to answer in order to succeed is: “How can niche sites tackle the challenge of content creation, especially if they are in a new area? More importantly, how do they monetize effectively?”
We tackle this quesiton in the Friday Podcast.

Here’re the notes:

Tackling fear of the unknown.

Understanding the problems (also known as opportunities) in any new market is key.
-Cost/performance – fees are based on amount of weight lost. program to lose 10lbs might cost a thousand dollars. that’s $100 per lb. lucrative?
-Weight management sites are the one of the best examples of membership sites. friend Rachel Rofe has a great site and has been profiled by magazines.
-Long term effects
-Mood swings, depression – biochemical balance

Visit forums, blogs and content sites in your chosen area and figure out the burning questions people are facing. Compile a list of the top 50 problems/questions and answer them – that will form the basis of your search engine AND human friendly content.
-Document the process
-Buy weight loss for dummies or atkins diet for dummies, visit wiki, head to google news.

As internet marketer, information is your most significant weapon.
Use it to your advantage.

Tune in to this week’s edition of the Friday Podcast to find out.


Friday Podcast: Are You A Prisoner Of Your Limitations?

The audio-only podcast can be accessed below:

Find out in this edition of the Friday Podcast.

Here’s the video:


Friday Podcast 26th Oct WhoIsAndrewWee.com
And the MP3 podcast audio version

Click on the “more” tab to access the notes:

bacon and eggs internet marketing

constant debate: Free. or for a fee.

idea behind it is list building

“the money is in the list” – meaning the bigger the list, the better.
but is this really true?

Conversions different.
might get in 10 free opt-ins for every customer who’s bought something from you and opt-ed into your list.

I’ve built list of thousands based on opt-ins to get a free product, but generally not very responsive.

some dynamics in which a free product can work.
for example, viral report, with opt-in call to action at end of the book. so if they haven’t read your book, they may never discover your mailing list.

which could be a good thing.
if you don’t have a rabid fan, and you just have someone who’s merely got a passing interest, you might not want them in your list.

list segregation.
prospects
customers
VIPs
–you want your VIP list as large as possible, means filtering leads.

—in any personal relationship, issue of commitment
think of this analogy:
breakfast of bacon and eggs.
The chicken is merely interested and probably a little involved.
The pig is committed.

Think about that, and have a good weekend.
For the friday podcast, this is andrew wee, signing out.


Friday Podcast 19 Oct 2007: Stay Out Of The Internet Marketing N

DerekBeau’s blog post: How I Became A Professional Affiliate Marketer

Podcast link:

Check out a PPC Classroom review here.




Monday Question: Internet Marketing Investment


Access the podcast via the buttons below:

Click the “more” tab below to access the notes:

Business Overdelivery and Profit Building

Value: Pay $5, get $5.

A lousy movie, is something you paid $10 for and gave you $9 of entertainment, or cardinal sin is ZERO entertainment = ie waste of time.

Overdelivery is when what you get, vastly exceeds what you paid…

Another real world example. Go for dinner at a nice restaurant, have a nice dinner, waiter gives you a slice of their signature triple fudge cake, or maybe a slice of freshly made key lime pie.

What’s happened here?

You spent $50 on dinner, waiter gave you two slices of cake, which costs $5 each and probably cost $2.50 to make(desserts have at least a 100% margin). What’s he done?

Taken $5 for the 2 slices of cake, and bought your satisfaction and potentially your loyalty.

Customer retention stats: at least 5-10 times more effort to get a new customer, than it takes to retain an existing customer.

Make sense to hold on to all your customers, doesn’t it?

–
World of Internet Marketing:
These days, about 40% of products out there give you value parity.
Pay $50, get $50 value.

Another 50% of products give you value destruction.
Pay $50, get $10 value.

So it doesn’t help to have a spectacular product launch, a number of big ones out there, my inside sources tell me some launches have >50% product refund rate.

So that $1 million product launch has $500k in product refunds. How cool is that?

Not really.

–
Choose to be in the long term business game.

Market your product at $50, be sure to give $100 in value.

Word of mouth marketing goes hand-in-hand with your brand and reputation.

–
Reality check:
the big name JV launch partners and crazy giveaways (buy $500 product, get $10,000 in bonuses), a lot of times result in one time sale.
$10,000 in bonuses fail to deliver. Is it really worth $10,000?
Not many people are capable of giving away $10,000 worth of value.

Wouldn’t you prefer to build lifelong customers?
Someone who would choose to buy your product, buy something with your name on it every time it comes to a buying decision?

Trying to play outside the overdeliverability frame sends a clear signal that you’re only here to earn the quick buck.

Strive instead to build a business empire built on a solid foundation of credibility, reliability and innovation.

Notes follow after clicking on the “more” tab.

Question: Too much email to read.

Internet Marketer: information marketer – info products are info packaged into products and sold for a price. Customers don’t buy PDFs or DVDs, they buy information contained in those products.

When an eBay customer goes there and bids and purchases an item, they do so because of a better price or bundled goodies which make the eBay item attractive, compared to their offline counterparts. In this case, you’re arbitraging or benefitting from your customer’s lack of market knowledge of where the best suppliers or dropshippers are located.

If you’ve got too much information and you’re unsubscribing yourself, you’re cutting yourself off from the very source that will make you a living!

Do I suffer from information overload?

Tech Reporter, deal with 10 different news sources.
Reuters, Bloomberg, news archives, might print up to 100 old articles for research.

Information is your weapon.

Let’s take another example:
Just imagine buying a new car.
If knew dealer’s price, and offered $50 above dealer’s price, rather than pay list price, how much better would you be?

If paying $4 for a car buyer’s guide or a $20 access fee to find out the manufacturer’s price to a dealer, would that be a worthwhile to spend that to save a couple of hundred dollars or a thousand dollars on your next car?

If that doesn’t make sense to you, you should stop listening now.

–
Info is your friend, not your enemy.

Deal with information overload:
1) Automate/Sort (Using one email for everything? That’s the problem! Set up different email accounts, one for mailing lists, one for prospects, one for customers. one for VIP customers. Use mail filters. Set up POP3 access for gmail accounts.)
2) Discipline (Time. Not more than 15mins once or twice a day. Take the most important, get assistant to handle the rest.)
3) Prioritize (Priority – 24 hours, Intermediate: radar screen, KIV: no fixed time limit)

–

Filing/archiving info:
copy and paste into text file. label that file: blogging.doc or i prefer blogging.txt

affiliate marketing.doc

keep files.
info lets you do trendspotting.

“History Repeats Itself”
What happened last Christmas is likely to repeat again
What happened before the launch of Harry Potter book 6 is likely to repeat during the launch of book 7.

Ability to spot trends, and more importantly forecast what’s coming up is going to play a key role in your ability to operate and more importantly, grow your business.

–
So if you feel you need to unsubscribe yourself from a mailing list today, or stop reading blogs and forums, go ahead, especially if you have a higher value and more profitable activity to focus on, like closing a sale.

If not, you could be leaving a very potent source of information which you can then convert into profits easily.

Notes follow, click the “More” below:

The Next Internet Millionaire.

There’s a virus spreading across the internet, especially hitting those who’ve just come onto the web.
I call it the “Spectator” mentality:

Symptoms include: listening to WebmasterRadio all day, but the irony is you might know everything, but never really DO anything about it.
Efforts might include setting up a 5-page website, or a blog somewhere or a squidoo lens.

Do you use the “hope and pray” model of traffic generation and monetization?

Set it up, let it sit, heck stats every few hours then wonder why there’re no sales?

Unfortunately neither Internet Marketing nor life is not a spectator sport,
Creating a website and letting it standing there in the middle of cyberspace is like erecting a billboard in the desert.

Is it any wonder that new marketers frequently come crying that Internet Marketing “doesn’t work”?

–
There’s more to internet marketing than spending a couple of hours making a website and letting it sit there.

In the Japanese language, the word “problem” is also same word as “opportunity”.

A comedian once said:

Can you help me with my credit card opportunity?
“I am experiencing many cash opportunities! Would you like to help?”

Call me cynical, but i think help should be reserved for the helpless?

Want help? learn to help yourself.

“no money, but want to start in Internet Marketing?”

Reality check: what’s complaining about it going to do?
Precedent: of the gurus and successful affiliates I know, a number only had $20 in the bank starting out.

Solution: get a payday loan, cash advance, borrow from friends and family.
To make some quick cash: go to forum, check the services section: do directory submission, write an article, go to blogger, set up a content site.
[not encouraged for the long term, but you do what you need to to survive]

Look at your options, most important, take action!

Success factors:

• Attitude: do you see opportunity or problems?
• Action: willing to put in effort to get what you want? Or are you using the hope and pray method? not very effective.
• The X-Factor: you need to see it inside of yourself, you need to stop guru worshipping, stop out of the shadows.

I appreciate positive comments, but what would encourage me more is hearing about your success in applying some of what you read on this blog, another blog, or on a forum.

Wondering who the next internet millionaire is going to be?
Head to the bathroom, and look in the mirror.

Notes follow (click on “More”)

Marketing Wizard Yanik Silver, has started a new series on his Internet Lifestyle blog.
So I’d like to reflect on what the “Internet lifestyle” means to me.

In prison, biggest pain is being prevented from doing what you want.

Out here, you might be in a different type of prison, restrained by having to go to the office from 9 to 5, or restained by being unable to go on a vacation (except during down time, whenever that may be).

The Internet lifestyle gives:

Money Freedom

-freedom from bills, freedrom from worrying about inflation, freedom from having to think about paying the mortgage.
Which is one of the reasons why cash advance, mortgage refinance and credit cards are among the hottest CPA offers.

Compare Time freedom versus Money freedom.
Time freedom is an even bigger one.

Time freedom to me means being able to bring my daughter to playschool twice a week, going to the mall in the middle of the afternoon, or taking a 2 hour nap after lunch, watching movie in the afternoon.

The Freedom of time, Freedom of money.
That’s the Internet Lifestyle.

For the session notes, click “more”

Levels of Social Engagement

• The Seinfeld [Cool! Nice! Wow!]
• The Interpretation/paraphrase [gets zero value] [“Wow, blogging means you write stuff and publish it! Cool! Nice! Wow!”]
• Analysis
• Application

Comment stickiness – Almost all comments i submit get published, they also bring traffic.

Social Noise? – If you aren’t contributing useful content, you’re contributing to the social noise.
Sooner or later the social noise get filtered.

Link Noise? – You’re evaluted not just by the commments you leave behind, but also by links.

You may not see it, but my team goes through every comment.
Check that it’s not linked to a MFA (Made for Adsense) site, or direct to a dubious sales or landing page.

I have empowered my editorial team to vet and if necessary, delete comments which fall into the “seinfeld” or “paraphrase/interpretation” category.

If you’re persistent, your post is flagged as spam and you will not get a second chance to make a first impression.
–
How then to Successfully Engage in Social Networking?

To be a successful social marketer, you need to look at the levels of social engagement. They’re similar to their real world counterparts.

Start out as:

• Casual contacts
• Friends
• Good friends
• Partners/JV

Observe the social rules!
Be sure to clear each level before proceeding to the next.

Trust and authority automatically come as you move up the ranks.

–
Jumping the Social Marketing Gun

Unless you are an established authority in the market, I wouldn’t suggest trying to shoot for a JV with your first email.

99 times out of a hundred, you’ll get the door slammed in your face.
–
Spammers to Friends?
Another tip, most bloggers and webmasters will have a mental notebook filled with the people who regularly spam their blogs and websites with seinfeld and paraphrase type messages.

If you’re one of those, your chances of become a friend, much less getting a partnership are severely reduced.

–
The Bottomline? Engage in Smart Marketing

It pays to be smart in your social marketing.
Work on the law of reciprocity, treat others as you’d like others to treat you, and you’ll do just fine.

Going by news reports, it looks more certain to be “Make” time.

Here are a couple of related offers:

–> US Apple iPhone offer

–> UK Cell Phone offer

Many newbies find making their first dollar online intimidating. But you can do a mind shift and see some interesting results.

Download audio file (WhoIsAndrewWee.com-friday-podcast9.mp3)

For the notes, click “more”…

Encountering Difficulty

Do you see it as a challenge or opportunity?

When faced with an obstacle, find a way to overcome it.

Inventions and progress are a result of overcoming an obstacle.

The newbie Internet Marketer’s mental obstacles:

• Making your first $1
• Making your first $100
• Making your first $1,000
• Making your first $10,000
• Making your first $100,000

>>> The sky IS the limit

Do “Quick Cash” methods have a place in your Internet Business?

Download audio file (WhoIsAndrewWee.com-friday-podcast7.mp3)

For the notes, click “more”

Internet Empire Building: 2 Key Principles

The Internet Money Making Master Plan

• Have a plan in mind.
• Types of business building: planned and unplanned.
• Doing expected vs doing what was unexpected.

The “It doesn’t make any difference” school of planning
6 months down the road? No progress?

The Effective Plan
Making a plan is just 10% of the effort, 90% of your success will come from carrying it out.

–

Long Tail Cash Generation

2 types of business:

• Long term
• Short term (AKA “Quick Cash”)

Quick cash:
1) short tail
2) one time burst of income, little recurring income
3) proportional or less than proportional return

Long term business:
1) a trickle, then a flood
2) takes time to develop
3) disproportionate level of return