Posts Tagged ‘shawn-collins’
In this edition of the Friday Podcast, I go into 5 important considerations if you’re serious about building your web business this year.
Note: The notes are pretty detailed, though the podcast itself contains even more content.
Enjoy!
Duration: 18 minutes | Filesize:Â 4.5 mb
Notes:
I get many questions about the tactical aspects of internet marketing, like what’s the best webhost, which is the best CPA network, how to configure a xml datafeed, how to use an autoresponder, which is the best ebook.
If you’re interested, I mention a number of these in the course of my blogging and i’ve listed a couple in my recommendations tabs.
But here’s the kicker, although these ‘technical’ questions represent about 90% of the questions that get asked, it’s the 10% of other questions that will help you grow your business and explode your profits!
The other questions deal with building your business, and positioning it for long term growth.
At the root of it,
Succeeding in internet marketing is simple and fundamental
1) Find a need.
2) Match it with a solution (could be a product/service)
Macro Issues in Internet Marketing
Most important than the ‘how do i learn HTML’ type questions are the macro or higher level considerations of your business strategy.
Your business strategy works as a business plan or blueprint to help you identify what you should or should not be doing.
It also goes into how you should be doing it.
If done correctly, your business plan will give you the answers to the questions you might be wondering about – like how do I select a partner, how much should i budget for my expenses and how much you should charge for your products, which offers or products should i promote.
Your business blueprint will drive what you do and when you’re stuck or you’re wondering about the next action you should take, it determines which of the tiny pieces of blog or affiliate or seo or ppc tools and software you will need.
I want to give you 5 important factors to take note of as you’re building your business this year.
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1) TRUST
If you’ve dealt with a bank, insurance provider, realtor or another service provider who’s serious about building a long term relationship, you’ll notice that they will spend time to get to know you and what you’re about. If they were to try to force you to buy something the first time you met, it would seriously damage or even kill the relationship.
A significant part of the success I experienced in my business last year was due to the network i built up and the relationships and contacts i had made.
Spend a moment to think about the people you consider your good friends, and the people you do business with.
what is it that makes you trust them?
How would you bring those values and attitudes into your business?
Consciously or unconsciously, we buy from people we like and we trust.
As an internet marketer and as an affiliate,
promotion doesn’t always need to be something that you’re an affiliate or something you own. Might be a free resource.
You may not benefit from it, but your audience could stand to benefit greatly from.
Take a look at the products that prominent marketers like Wil Reynolds, Shawn Collins, Geordie Carswell, Sam Harrelson talk about and mention on their blogs.
Aaron Wall provides a number of free equivalents for products which other marketers are charging hundreds of dollars for, in a list of resources in his SEO Book. His intention is to help you grow your business and that builds trust.
Build trust.
You might recommend something free today, but if you build up your social goodwill bank (refer to blog post), you will reap the rewards later.
*** on a strong, reliable and trusted recommendation, conversions can be higher than 50%.
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Two elements are critical to the success of any social marketing campaign.
The first element is one that just about everyone is good at – The size of your network.
I say everyone is good at this element because all it takes to massively increase the number of friends in your MyBlogLog, BumpZee, YouTube, Facebook or other community is hitting the ‘add friend’ button and doing it over, and over, and over, and over again.
But here’s where it gets interesting, the fine line between social marketing and spamming is drawn when the relationship and more importantly permission and consensus are factored in.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve datamined someone’s email, cell phone from the net, your attempt to game the social network for personal gain falls flat on its face if you don’t have the relationship to back it up.
You might be wondering if this is merely ‘theoretical’ or ‘hypothetical’ or how well it works in real life…
Look at what happened to me last year…
I’ve been active on the WickedFire affiliate marketing forum for some time, giving advice on my pet area of blogging. So having been invited to be a ‘Blogging Guide’, I spend more time on the forum and create an instructional thread on “Blogging For Bucks”
And one day I read a thread on the forum about this new Super Affiliate’s blog, Super Affiliate Mindset.
And after talking with PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta for some time, we decide to jointly work on a product, which eventually becomes the Super Affiliate Accelerator. (the site is being upgraded at the moment).
The project is intended to create a series of custom training to provide business strategies and PPC tactics to new and experienced affiliate marketers.
Part of the program involves inviting other established Internet Marketers in on some of the mastermind sessions we’re organizing.
So I ask my friend Wil Reynolds, founder of top SEO agency Seer Interactive, to join in on one of our upcoming calls.
And as part of my research, I watch some of Wil’s videos from Shawn Collins and Missy Ward’s Affiliate Summit Seminar.
If you’re new to Search Engine Optimization, undoubtedly, Wil’s suggestions to check out 3 key blogs to keep you up to date on SEO developments will be intriguing.
What are the 3 blogs?
Listening to Wil’s recommendations, I opened my copy of SEOBook I’d purchased early last year.
I’d glanced through it a number of times and picked up great SEO tips and subsequently listed it on my recommendations page.
Now, with the weight of Wil’s endorsement, I re-read it (all 350 pages in a 2 hour sitting).
If you have not read it yet, you will not know that it goes beyond SEO, to encompass Aaron’s copywriting strategies and even PPC management. More importantly, Aaron includes elements of his Internet Marketing journey from spamming links to creating quality white hat links.
If you haven’t yet, why not spend the opening days of this year, checking out Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.
Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins has kindly put up the presentations from the recent (and inaugural) Affiliate Summit London.
Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds
One of the presenters, Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds didn’t fail to shine as always with his “SEO For the New Google / Yahoo! / MSN” presentation (somewhat wordy, but chock full of content as usual).
No word yet on whether Shawn will have the videos up, but you can download (more…)
Missy Ward and Shawn Collins’ Affiliate Summit West 2008 from February 24-26, 2008 at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, looks like it’s shaping up to be yet another successful conference.
They’ve secured Jim Kukral as the MC.
According to Shawn’s post “Speaker Submissions for ASW 08”:
The submission deadline is October 26, 2007. Read through all of the information on the speaker submission page. submissions failing to follow the instructions and/or adhere to the deadline will not be considered.
…Accepted speakers will be notified no later than November 16, 2007.
Due to the volume of submissions, we will not notify applicants if they have not been accepted. Therefore, if you have not been contacted by November 16, 2007, your proposal was not accepted.
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The speaking proposals are evaluated on the basis of:
How are speaker submissions selected?
The speaker submissions are reviewed by the Affiliate Summit Advisory Board and selected on a number of factors, including speaking experience, industry reputation, and attention to detail (failure to follow instructions on the form will count against you), etc.
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Here’s an interesting idea from a year ago for ASW 07 (held in January this year)
If you are interested in speaking, one thing that would help evaluate your proposal is if you also send a video (just fire up a Web cam to shoot it) and talk about what you’ll be speaking about at the conference. (Potential Affiliate Summit Speakers – Send Us Your Videos)
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Although taking the effort to put together a video – scripting, shooting, editing – will take (more…)
In case you’ve missed out on making it to the recent Affiliate Summit East in Miami, the event’s co-founder Shawn Collins has posted the videos up.
Aside from the speech by Ze Frank which I understand had the audience rolling in the aisles, almost every other presentation is available for free.
I’ve watched about half of my buddy Amit Mehta’s Super PPC Affiliate presentation, and am looking forward to checking out the other Super Affiliate session with Jeremy Palmer, Vinny Lingham and Ros Gardner, as well as Wil Reynolds andKris Jones too.
Conservatively if I were to put a value on this material, it’d easily run into the thousands (more…)
This is a follow up to my “What Happens When Merchants Don’t Play By Affiliate Marketing Rules?” post, which I believe affiliate marketers will be keenly interested in.
I called the merchant and talk to them, and what they told me surprised me.
But first, a summary: With a gap in a web service merchant’s affiliate commission payouts on an affiliate network and their in-house program, I was keen to hear what veterans in the affiliate industry had to say. The commission payout through the affiliate network was about 50% higher, compared to the merchant’s in-house program.
Communicating with the merchant was certainly a key point in addressing this issue and some might say the information gap was being unfairly used in this instance:
“That’s retarded. Tell them to retroactively apply the network rate to your in-house sales from the date they started that network rate. If they won’t, dump them..” – Geordie Carswell, RevenueWire EVP.
“I attribute the fault in this to the affiliate manager/team handling your account. It is he or she’s job is to make sure affiliates (super or not) are taken care of. That person should have given you the choice as to which network you promote their program through, or at least told you about both offers. You are a well known affiliate and blogger and you should have been informed of both options. The affiliate marketing managers of Pepperjam are in constant contact with the affiliates who make a difference our programs. We build and form relationships to gain trust. The affiliate manager who was assigned to you did not do that.” – Robyn Martin, Pepperjam Affiliate Marketing Director.
“Before I began working for LinkConnector Affiliate Network, I was the affiliate manager for a few different companies. I considered it one of my responsibilities to keep our payouts consistent between the in-house program and the network programs. If anything, our in-house program sometimes had a higher payout because no additional fees were involved. I would never have considered that disparity between commissions – that’s just shooting yourself in the foot.” – Jeannine Crooks, LinkConnector.com Affiliate Sales Manager.
“I personally feel strongly that bigger and pro-actively managed programs SHOULD offer 2 versions.
In-house and a good network. TYPICALLY, but not in this case the in-house commissions would be a little higher, possibly longer cookies, etc. to make the in-house option more attractive and offset network costs…a possible scenario hit me that COULD make sense of this situation. Not saying this scenario would make the situation any easier for you to take but…
If the merchant, like many are was clueless and the affiliate program was not being tended to properly and they hired an OPM.” – Linda Buquet, 5Star Affiliate Programs Founder.[See the 5Star discussion thread]
Which is in-line with what I would expect. An in-house program would have lower operating costs and could give out higher payouts, but the opposite scenario is at work here.
And Chickenfeed AKA Millnic Media‘s Jason Bailey chimed in with:
“you got hosed and it is your own fault. This IS the standard practice and fully within the marketers code of ethics. (I can see the shit flying at me already…)…In House programs are notoriously low payers. They are also usually the most poorly managed of the places you can pull a particular offer from. CPA networks have schwacks of experience with a wide variety of offers, merchants and publishers. In house affiliate managers are often the webmaster as well, and quite possibly the night doorman to boot (not always  **dodges shit** –)…
You got hosed. If you were doing well at $60, think how much better you’ll at $90. Hell if the CPA network is offering at $90 on the street and you can push some volume, I’ll bet the can get $95 no sweat. Suck it up. Don’t make that mistake again. Lot at the bright side – You just got a $30 pay bump!..Join all the big networks and shop around. Get them fighting each other for your traffic. You have to be the squeaky wheel to get the big payouts. Logging into CJ to see what is new doesn’t cut it.
And as Share Results Network affiliate manager (more…)
