Some of the topics we discussed:

• What’s the difference between marketing success and failure and what’re the reasons behind this
• What’s the major stumbling blocks that marketers constantly face and how do they break through them
• If you’re an employee, how soon should you quit your job to go into affiliate marketing full time?
• Techniques to increase your chances of business success
• Why Amit has created a new Profit Swami blog, when he has a Super Affiliate Mindset blog
• Upcoming developments at PPC Classroom

Check out the podcast below:

Links:

• Amit on Twitter
• Profit Swami
• PPC Classroom

Amit’s is gaining a reputation as the $2.4m super affiliate and a regular speaker at events like Affiliate Summit and PPC Classroom.

Anik is founder of Affiliate Classroom and AC Certified, and recently ranked #2 in Business Week’s “Top 25 under 25” article.

During our podcast, we discussed:

• How Amit’s affiliate campaigns differ from other marketers
• How to build your income to 4 figures a day
• Steps you can take today to put together successful campaigns
• The importance and how you can incorporate long-tail keywords in your affiliate campaigns
• Whether there’s a conflict of interest between a merchant’s in-house SEO/SEM efforts and the efforts of affiliates
• Amit’s “Hybrid Model” that he’s currently testing and will be teaching in PPC Classroom 2.0
• Details of PPC Classroom 2.0.

Tune in to the Friday Podcast:

Links:

• Amit’s Super Affiliate Mindset blog
• Amit’s previous Friday Podcast interview
• PPC Classroom 2.0
• Anik Singal’s AC Certified program for affiliate managers

So the question is “Was it worth a 20+ hour plane ride each way?”

Certainly a resounding YES!

I got to meet a bunch of great people and the stellar cast of speakers presented great content. Now it’s a matter of hunkering down and putting some of those ideas into practise.

The turnout was very respectable with the room filled to the gills…

It was great to hear how Anik took one of his info product sites, added CPA offers to it and have it generated $42,000+ to date this year.

Andrew Wee and Anik Singal

Just as you’re seeing a convergence of search marketing and PPC marketing, I believe the worlds of info marketing and lead generation/affiliate marketing are going to draw closer in the coming year.

Andrew Wee, Kirt Christensen, Greg Cesar

I look to Kirt Christensen as one of the pioneers in Internet Marketing, together with his partner, Terry Dean.

It was certainly illuminating to hear about his strategies for positioning yourself as a PPC management agency and it was pretty impressive hearing about some of the biggest Internet marketers he manages PPC campaigns for.

Greg Cesar is someone who’s in my mastermind and this was the first opportunity I got to meet him. It was refreshing to hear about some of his unconventional approaches to affiliate marketing, and he talked about how he uses one media channel (still untapped by almost all internet marketers) to go gang busters, especially on affiliate offers.

If anything, I am finding that the networking opportunity far outweighs the learning from the content sessions. I met Andre Chaperon who was top affiliate for the PPC Classroom promotion, Ryan Kaltman (AKA “Magic Ryan”, the Rich Jerk’s business partner). Ryan’s like a ball of energy and having him show gross YouTube videos during a posh dinner certainly breaks the monotony of it all. (plus some unmentionables which I’ll not go into here…)

After working on a number of projects, I finally got to meet up with my business partner, PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta.

Greg Cesar, Amit Mehta, Andrew Wee

If you have caught Amit’s Affiliate Summit East presentation, then you know that Amit delivers 110% on his content.

His keynote speech and presentation at PPC Classroom Live were no exception…

One thing that newer internet marketers fail to grasp is the mindset element, and there’s an overemphasis on the tactical elements (eg. landing pages, keyword lists, quality score). If you take a step back, you’d realize that the business systems and mindset are what makes you the mega bucks…

Simon Leung, Andrew Wee

Simon Leung’s changed his look from his avatar, so here’s how he looks now.

I was pretty jet lagged, so I had to crash during his talk.

Andrew Wee, Ros Gardner

It was my first time meeting Ros Gardner too. We had just missed each other at Affiliate Summit West earlier this year.

She did an interesting presentation, comparing her $1+ million earnings against Jeremy Palmer’s $1+ million earnings and doing an analysis on how their methods differ.

If anything, her disclosure that blogs are the main platform that she uses, ties in with what I’ve been hearing from other super affiliates recently.

David Bullock, Andrew Wee

Dave Bullock’s talk on Taguchi testing certainly raised my awareness on the specific details about Taguchi testing. It’s not something I’d do right now (split testing seems sufficient for now), but perhaps in the future.

Super Affiliate Accelerator Insider’s Breakfast

On Sunday, Amit and I hosted an Insider’s Breakfast for our Super Affiliate Accelerator breakfast.

It was great meeting up with the Super Affiliate Accelerator members and share some techniques to bring their business and their campaigns to the next level.

Affiliate Radar Rakeesh, Andrew Wee, Mark Roth

I’d spoken to Affiliate Radar creator Mark Roth a number of times and was involved in the launch of Affiliate Radar, so it was great to meet up with Mark and Rakeesh.

I also met Jay Stockwell who developed SpeedPPC.

And if you need proof of the Affiliate Classroom team’s dedication…

Rachel Honoway, Andrew Wee

Affiliate Classroom VP of Marketing Rachel Honoway lost her voice during the event.

After some googling, I discovered that “Vegas Throat” is common, and is mainly due to the dry desert air.

I’ve made a mental note to bring some “Pi Pa Gao” a Chinese herbal throat/cough mixture, so I’ll be fully prepared to speak at Affiliate Summit West in February.

Did you know that some entertainers (specifically singers) will not perform in Vegas due to possible damage to their vocal chords due to Vegas Throat?

Interesting…

After the event, we headed to the Voodoo Lounge on the 51st floor of the Rio, and here’s a shot of the skyline:

It was good to chill after the event:

Evelyn Grazini, Ros Gardner, Rachel Honoway

And here’s a pic of Anik and Ros getting jiggly with it…

So the next time I’ll be in Vegas will be in February for Shawn Collins and Missy Ward’s Affiliate Summit West where I’ll be on the Media Panel, moderated by Revenue Editor-in-chief Lisa Picarille, together with Anik Singal and Valerie Stevens (Insight Magazine Online)

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.

–

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%.

–

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.

–

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.

–

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.

Check out a PPC Classroom review here.




Monday Question: Internet Marketing Investment


Access the podcast via the buttons below:

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.

In response to customer requests, PPC Classroom now offers a 3-installment payment plan of $187 each. This should make this groundbreaking product within the reach of new affiliate marketers.

I have heard that sales are either approaching or have broken the 1,000 mark, ranking this among the most successful product launches.

Not to be left behind, Amit Mehta and I have launched the Super Affiliate Accelerator program as a bonus for our PPC Classroom customers.

Here’s what you’ll get:

• PPC Zero to Hero Coaching: a 9-week hard hitting coaching program, where you’ll see how a PPC campaign is developed from the ground up, researched, launched, test and tracked, and optimized. You’ll have the skills to replicate the campaign.
• AM^2 Toolkit: This is a set of strategies and tools that Amit uses in his own campaigns. He’s not shown them to anyone, except his consulting clients. Here’s your chance to get access.
• Affiliate Mind Meld sessions: This is a series of sessions where we’ll interview leading figures in the affiliate industry and gain a better understanding of each person’s techniques. Even better, we’ll teach you how to apply them in your own campaigns.

PPC Classroom Bonus: Amit Mehta And Andrew Wee’s Super Affiliate – The best video clips are here

Not enough?

For the next 12 hours (from Friday noon EST to Friday Midnight), Amit and I will be adding on a 2 hour LIVE coaching call. We’ll go into specific super affiliate techniques that you can apply immediately, have Hot Seats lined up where we’ll analyze and optimize PPC campaigns in real time and take your most burning questions. This session will have very LIMITED capacity.

Note: Outside of this promotion, the Super Affiliate Accelerator is not available. Take action now to avoid disappointment.

To get these bonuses, you need to sign up for PPC Classroom NOW. (from the link to the left).

To claim your bonuses, send your payment verification to enquiries(at)whoisandrewwee<dot>com before Friday Midnight EST. NO EXCEPTIONS.

This edition of the Friday Podcast focuses on possibly pitfalls for the budding Internet Marketer.

Jump across this chasm that faces almost every business owner and you’ll be shooting for the stars.

Detailed notes follow, click on the “more” tab:

As a business owner involved in the process of building your internet marketing business, you will inevitably face the “time and money” dilemma.

The fact is that both time and money are limited resources.

Although money seems like the bigger limiting factor when you start out, you can work around it by using your own time, which seems free. Instead of DIY, do it yourself, you’d probably end up with DEY, do EVERYTHING yourself.

Here’s a problem…

Getting Paralyzed by the “Bootstrap Mentality”

Business develops, you’ll find that time is your limiting factor.
After all, there are ONLY 24 hours in a day.
As you still going to DEY?

Know of a number of experienced Internet Marketers who choose to work by themselves.

They:

• Synchronize their web content by FTPing up and down hundreds of files
• Answer email
• Maintain, clean up, update, archive their mailing list
• Develop their website
• Design logos and graphics
• Coordinate their joint ventures
• Manage affiliates.

They eat their lunch in front of the computer.

During a break, they pop a DVD into their computer and watch a movie.
They spend more than 12 hours in front of the computer each day…

Pretty soon their IM business takes over their life.
They may be making a five figure, or even six figure a month income, but it’s as good as being chained to their computer.
Having to check email every couple of hours, answering emails, talking to partners, writing and creating next product.

Income is also capped, reaches a ceiling.
There’s only so much you can do even with 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

–
Contrast: Super Affiliate Lifestyle

• Go on 2 week holiday.
• Travel halfway round the world to attend an event or perhaps to speak at a workshop,

This means you HAVE to automate your business.
Income comes in, even when you’re out on a night on the town, or at your kid’s birthday party.
But that’s the exception.

–
The rule or business as usual seems to revolve around Internet Marketers who haven’t gone on vacation for a couple of YEARS.
How’s that better than working in a regular job?
At least with a day job, you don’t have to check email on Saturday and Sunday and on Christmas Day and New Year’s.

If you can’t enjoy the benefits of your success, then what’s the point in doing all of this?

–

A Solution?: From StartUp to SetUp

One key component to overcoming the bootstrap mentality is to move from the StartUp mentality up to the SetUp mentality.

With the SetUp mentality, you GAIN CONTROL of your time.

SetUp Mentality: 3 Principles:

• System:

Process is clear, easy to follow, organized.
System follows rules, principles.
Also allows you to outsource efforts.
Outsourcing is nothing short of a minor miracle.
Pay someone to buy their time to do your stuff.
Pay someone to check your email, do your webpage, even clean the house, so you don’t have to.
You’re converting your cash into time.
You’re buying time.

You can use that time to enjoy yourself.

• Mentor/Role model

Find someone very skilled in their specialized field.
I’ve advanced very quickly as a journalist, to managing people’s businesses, to doing training and consulting, and now Internet Marketing because I’ve had the opportunity to work with the best in whatever field I’ve entered.

Success creates success.
If you learn your stuff from a Top Gun, you’ll BECOME a Top Gun.

Why’s it great? Because there’s a time issue involved.
You can slash the time required to learn a new skill by learning from someone who’s invested the time to go through the process.

Note: you have to be realistic too. If someone’s spent a long time learning something, you can’t expect to master it in an hour or in a day.
That’s just NOT possible.

If someone’s spent 5 years learning and more importantly, mastering a skill and he can teach it to you in a couple of months, or perhaps weeks, you’ve shaved off YEARS from your learning cycle.

If you have realistic expectations and are motivated to succeed, a mentor can bring you far.

I’ve been working with PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta to master pay-per-click based affiliate marketing, and based on the initial results, they’ve been nothing short of spectacular.

–
When you look at two of the three pillars of the SetUp mentality, you’d realize that the solid business system, and a strong role model give you an almost unethical advantage…

What if you added the third component?

• Mastermind/ focus group

Another way to multiply your progress is to work together with others who are also reaching for the same goals.
Key to a mastermind is keeping in constant communication and learning from each other’s successes, and more importantly, failures.

If you create an atmosphere where success and failures are openly shared, you are tapping on experience gained on someone else’s time to speed yourself along the learning curve.

Although there’s a fair amount of cross-learning when you visit a blog or a forum, nothing comes close to forming your own mastermind group.

–
I’ve experienced this, and I’ve seen this, that having all 3 components – the proven business system, a strong mentor and a mastermind gives you tremendous progress.

If you’re missing one of these components now, work on that aspect and you’ll see your business fly.

PS: I’m working on something with Amit that will top our bonus for Anik Singal and Jeremy Palmer’s PPC Classroom: Super Affiliate Accelerator, it’ll be announced about Friday noon, EST.

Stay tuned.

–

A major grouse I have with “shopping comparison sites” is that there’s often no “comparison” involved. They’re usually just a bunch of scraped data from affiliate datafeeds. There’s no “opinion” or comparison of the pros and cons of the product. Just a pile of digital trash on the information highway in my opinion.

It’s frequently the same case with Internet Marketing product “reviews” too…You know those ads that go:

“Is Product XYZ A Scam? Check here to find the facts!”
OR
“Don’t Buy Product XYZ Till You Read This Review”
OR my favorite
“An Honest Review of Product XYZ” (yeah right…)

If you head over to the page, you usually see a regurgitation of the marketing material, or just a listing of the product’s specifications, the price and maybe some bogus “bonus”…whoopee…

–
In my past vocation as a tech journalist, I used to evaluate product and service offerings from the likes of Microsoft, Iomega, Diamond Multimedia, Creative Technology among others. The product reviews were subsequently syndicated on the newswires and online tech portals, so I’ll use the same methodology here as well.

What’s good and bad about PPC Classroom?

First off, the product is pretty comprehensive.
From the product graphic, it looks like:

• 4 manuals
• 7 discs (probably a combination of CDs or DVDs)
• At least 8 handouts
• Super Affiliate Jeremy Palmer’s “top secret” software tool for tracking ad campaigns across various pay-per-click search engines (a necessity once you are spending large amounts on PPC on a daily basis).

–
Regarding the course structure, it’s geared towards newer affiliate marketers with topics on:

• An introduction to PPC and affiliate marketing
• Keyword matching
• Understanding PPC stats
• Finding niches and identifying hot demand
• Evaluating your competition and building your USP (unique selling proposition)

And the bread and butter of the PPC-affiliate marketing trade, affiliate marketing monetization strategies including:

• Direct linking
• Arbitrage/direct merchange linking
• Landing pages
• Opt-in (a hybrid PPC->email marketing approach)
• and evaluating the different categories of offers.

Intermediate level affiliate marketers will likely benefit from more advanced topics like:

• Complementary keyword strategies
• The keyword buying cycle
• Long end of the tail
• How to find emerging/undiscovered products
• Geo-targeting/time-based campaigning/day parting
• Keyword trigger/content trigger/hybrid strategies
• And a dissection of landing pages

Jeremy also chips in with his advanced tips and techniques, and emphasizes topics like ROI and bidding and positioning strategies.

–

Although there’s lots of material to go through, it’s laid out in an easy-to-understand manner.

Is PPC Classroom a complete product?

Not likely. If anything, things change so quickly in the Internet Marketing arena that no single product will be able to contain “everything”.

Which is why Anik and Jeremy have set up a series of webinars and have a forum in the works.

If it’s anything like Anik’s previous Affiliate Classroom program, you can expect to have a flood of content and continuing updates.

–
What I liked about the course content is that they’ve got a crack technical writing team to put the written materials together.

The concepts are explained in an easy-to-understand and sequential manner and are a stark contrast to the barely comprehensible manner in which most “make money online” books are written.

If you’re looking for a few quick and dirty tips to make a few quick bucks from your typical $47 or $97 ebook, PPC Classroom will not be your cup of tea. In fact, you’d probably find that there’s way too much reading involved…

If instead, you’re looking for a great resource to start building an online business, PPC Classroom is certainly worth a second look.

–
I’m not directly promoting PPC Classroom.
If you’re interested, you might like to check out this bonus package that my buddy, Super Affiliate Amit Mehta has put together.

Note: The “bonus package” promo was for the last PPC Classroom promo. You can visit the newest review.