Just as celebrity fans check the magazines to find out who’s dating who, what they wore to the MTV awards, or who they’re currently feuding with, likewise in the internet marketing world, legions of marketers constantly scour the blogs and forums to find out what a successful marketer’s shopping trip cost, how much they paid (or overpaid) for a rare painting, or just pictures of their $1,000 dinner.

While reading this news can be a source of motivation for some, the risk in spending just about all your time on this pursuit can be detrimental to your business growing efforts.

I’ve been talking to my friend NickyCakes about issues of time management and prioritization, here are a couple of issues for consideration:

• Prioritization: Are you spending 90% of your time relaxing, spending your time checking out cool stuff to buy, planning your next vacation, researching your business (ie: reading blogs and forums, chatting over IRC), leaving 10% of your time to actually running your business? Or should it be the other way around?
• Focus: How much of what you are doing now will help you get what you want? Or could that time be better spending doing something more productive?
• “Secrets” of Internet Marketing: As mentioned by guests on the Friday Podcast, although you can learn strategies and techniques from blogs, forums, books, courses and networking at seminars and conferences, ultimately your success will rely on taking action, as well as testing and measuring your results. If you’re looking for a magic wand or magic dust to achieved your desired income level, you could be looking for a long time.

You can check out Harrison’s tips on setting up his PPC campaigns.

I probably spend about 1-2 hours each day driving and where I used to listen to music, then later switched to listening to news programs like the BBC, I’ve since switched to listening to podcasts a couple of months ago.

Why listen to podcasts? I personally would absorb more information out of a book, especially since I like to mark them up, but a podcast is a good way to multi-task, especially if you’re short on time and a great way to find something to do while you’re driving, exercising (I’m shooting for at least 2 hours of exercise a week to fight the flab), or while cleaning my desk or doing paperwork.

My personal preference is to go for programs with useful content, although I do like the occasional “talk radio” style podcast with hosts who are doing a “Seinfeld” (ie a podcast about nothing…) but generally that doesn’t take up more than 5% or 10% of my listening time.

If a podcast contains very good information, I’ll make a mental note to go through it again and take down notes.

Here’re some of the podcasts which I listen to and might be useful for you:

• Lisa Picarille and Shawn Collins’ “Affiliate Thing“: A great weekly topical podcast, Lisa and Shawn usually have a number of industry experts on their show and cover the latest shows.
• Sam Harrelson’s Affiliate Fortune Cookies: This is a new project which Sam has recently started up and it follows a “22 minute” (refering to the program length) daily podcast (5 days a week) format . It’ll be interesting to see Sam keep this up and perhaps make reference to it during the Social Marketing panel that he’ll be moderating at Affiliate Summit West. (Especially since the session synopsis reads “With almost 50% of Internet users now creating and sharing their own content, this new medium is changing how markets operate and how companies communicate with consumers.“
• Jeremy Schoemaker AKA Shoemoney’s Shoemoney Show: Jeremy hosted the Net Income show which featured interesting guests and where Pepperjam’s Kris Jones talked about doing seasonal PPC campaigns based on UGG boots and the American Idol television series to great effect. The latest show continues the tradition.

In addition to these, I buy quite a number of information products on CD or MP3, and also have utilities to rip DVD videos into MP3 tracks, so finding more audio material to listen to isn’t an issue.

If you’re looking for more audio podcasts, you might also like to check out the SEO podcasts on WebmasterRadio.fm. I spoke to WebmasterRadio founder Daron Babin (AKA SEGuru) last week and he mentioned that a number of new programs are in development.

Linda Woods’ (CEO and President of Partnercentric) new Affiliate Marketing Insider podcast looks interesting.

Shawn, Sam and Jim Kukral have recently launched/re-launched Geekcast.fm which will be a podcast aggregator of sorts.

For more podcasts, check out:

• Listing of podcasts on Shawn Collins’ iPod
• Carsten Cumbrowski’s Podcast Directory

On a conservative basis, I’d say that monetization from my blogging alone amounts to somewhere in the mid to higher 4 figure range per month.

Which is a pittance compared to some of the “Super Bloggers” out there.

There’s a lot of talk these days about how much the top bloggers make, especially in the light of Business Week’s “Bloggers Bring In The Big Bucks” story.

Although I know Darren Rowse and Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker and visit Mario Lavandeira’s PerezHilton and Pete Cashmore’s Mashable, the names on the list were alien to me.

It’s a testament that blogging is an open field and you pick your niche and can do well with it.

But if you’re clued in to the power of blogging, you’d realize that the payoff from blogging comes outside of blogging.

If you listened in to the episode of the Net Income radio show where Shoemoney had Matt Mullenweg, part of the team which developed the WordPress blogging platform, the real money comes as a result of having blogged, rather than because of blogging.

If you missed that episode of Net Income, you can check it out:

As an example, Darren Rowse is a founder of the B5Media blog network, which receive venture funding earlier this year and Shoemoney’s income also comes from promoting CPA offers and developing AuctionAds with partner-in-crime Dave Dellanave AKA Dillsmack. AuctionAds was recently acquired by Media Whiz for an undisclosed sum.

Personally, blogging is a platform to network and form joint ventures, it’s given me the opportunity to “meet up” with several influential super affiliates and information marketers and importantly, clients. Meeting up at events in a face-to-face context is just a way of cementing the relationship.

If you want to exploit blogging to its fullest potential, you need to look at it as more than just a website to pimp adsense or affiliate offers, it’s value as a branding platform is infinitely greater.

I’ve always enjoyed the impressionist paintings of Claude Monet, and his works are still enjoyed nearly a century later. It’s likely they’ll continue to be enjoyed for generations to come. All accomplished with a paintbrush and paint.

Similarly, a blog is just that, a tool, just like Monet’s humble paintbrush.

In the hands of an individual with extraordinary vision, you can do much more than what you thought was possible.

Daron Babin’s (SE Guru) WebmasterRadio.fm is home to a ton of great content and I listen to many of the great shows there.

This week, Affiliate Thing, hosted by Revenue Editor-in-chief Lisa Picarille and Affliate Summit co-founder and affiliate marketing fixture Shawn Collins talked about the new podcast shows like:

• Jeff Doak and Sam Harrelson’s “Jeff and Sam Talk Tech, Marketing, Teh Internets and Stuff“
• Jim Kukral and Steve Rosenbaum’s “Video Ninjas“

and the new Shoemoney Show. (I guess Jeremy might have a little more time following the sale of AuctionAds to Media Whiz)

It was great to hear that Shawn listens to my Friday Podcast and mentioned it on the episode “The British Invasion: Affiliate Style” as well as on his blog entry “The Podcasts on my iPod“.

Besides checking out Affiliate Thing and the Shoemoney show, I also recommend new affiliate marketers to check out the “Affiliate Marketing Today” podcasts. Although the show is currently inactive, it’s worth checking out the archive for episodes hosted by Super Affiliate Jeremy Palmer. The 2004-2005 episodes hosted by ABestWeb founder Haiko de Poel are an excellent primer.

Although it might sound like I listen to many podcasts, I usually have a couple of gig on my hard disk and listen to it when I can.

I have a Nokia N73 Music Edition smart phone with about 2GB of memory on it, at the moment I’ve got John Carlton’s “Kickass Copywriting Secrets of a Marketing Rebel” and Mike Litman/Matt Bacak’s “Ultimate Lifestyle Workshop” on it. The rest of the memory is taken up by video footage of my daughter, Bianca Wee.

Carsten Cumbrowski has podcast resources listed at his resource site Cumbrowski.com.

I just bought about $400 worth of used teleconferencing equipment off eBay (and had to pay about $30 in taxes when it got to Singapore), so you might hear more interesting Friday Podcasts in the near future.

In the meantime, if I had a wishlist of podcast shows, I would be interested in tuning in to the following:

• “The Super Affiliate Show” hosted by Jeremy Palmer and Amit Mehta.
• Pepperjam head honcho Kris Jones and his fiancee (and also Pepperjam Affiliate Marketing Director) Robyn Martin in the “Mr and Mrs Jones Affiliate Show” (they’re sure to blow the socks off the Brangelina “Mr and Mrs Smith” flick)
• “Blogging Strategies and Secrets” featuring SleepyBlogger and MyBlogLog community manager Robyn Tippins and the Blogga from Down Unda’ Yaro Starak.
• “SEO Gurus” with webmastworld denizens Todd “Stundubl” Malicoat and Michael “Graywolf” Gray
• “The 5Star – ShareResults” show with 5Star Affiliate president Linda Buquet and ShareResult’s tap dancer and affiliate manager Jamie Fortunaso

I realize that the last thing you’d want to do is see another “5 Podcasts I’d Like To See” meme spreading around (and I’m suffering from meme fatigue too).

Let’s restrict it to the comments and if you want to blog and trackback to here, I’ll help publicize your posts.

But what I’m most interested in is your opinion on the concepts I’ve proposed, maybe I’ll shoot Daron an email. Or if there’re shows you’d like to see (that’s not on WMR already), list it in the comments and more interestingly, why you’d think it’d work.

If you didn’t make it down, Shawn has posted a listing of WebProNews’ video coverage of the event.

Jim Kukral seems to have been holed up in the Blogging Room the entire event and has posted quite a bit of content. Pity I wasn’t down there, else I’d have visited him once or twice (For real this time, Jim…)

He did post this marvel of a pic though:

Missy Ward and Internet Girl Geek Stephanie [Let me emphasize that’s it’s SIMULATED]

Shawn has also blogged about ASE:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3

5Star Affiliate Linda Buquet has linked to the Affiliate Summit East blog posts. [Incidentally I won 5Star’s “Blog Buzz” prize a week back. Thanks Linda!].

Shoemoney has posted his reflections on Affiliate Summit East and has a number of interesting photos in his photo gallery.

Super Affiliate Zac Johnson, who spoke at ASE, has posted his thoughts on the event on his blog. If you didn’t make it to the show, you might be interested in his ASE swag giveaway. [The monkey looks cute, Zac, and I see you have 3 of them…hint, hint]

I guess someone out there would be interested in the WickedFire shirt.

The next Affiliate Summit will be in the UK, and following that in Vegas next year!

You might’ve received a notification about the site targeting Baby Boomers and “Generation Joneses” last week.

It appears to be a fairly “mass” campaign, rather than a targeted one because I’m clearly a “Gen Xer” (born between 1965-79).

Although guys like Shoemoney, PepperJam’s Kris Jones, Gauher Chaudhry and Amit Mehta do really well with PPC traffic to CPA offers, I’m thinking that building a dedicated niche community helps you get better leverage out of your lead generation efforts.

With Gauher’s background in information marketing, I’m sure he’s one of the frontrunners in putting this process into action.

This requires a paradigm shift, from going beyond just a product-based focus to a demographic/psychographic-based focus.

Just imagine BoomJ providing a variety of finance-related, health-related, biz op-related offers and you can see that the potential for revenue multiplication is very high.

It goes beyond providing an offer, to building a relationship, and that’s where the opportunities show themselves.

WebProNews’ Jason Lee Miller has mentioned the start of the Niche Network Era. Some might say it’s a revolution, but perhaps it’s more an evolution of the social community idea kicked off by the behemoths like MySpace and Facebook, into something that’s financially sustainable and self-sufficient.

It’s more than just collecting warm bodies, it’s turning into a real business.

I don’t read many magazines, reading most of my content and feature content online.

Besides reading the print edition of Singapore’s major English daily, The Straits Times, which comes with weekly tech, fashion and lifestyle “magazines”, on the rare occasion, I check out:

• Revenue (I read the online digital edition when I can)
• Skymall catalogue found on most domestic flights
• Tabloids like US, People

Tabloids and rag mags are a good opportunity to conduct niche research, especially for FMCG (fast moving consumer goods). You can find out which are the hot jeans, perfumes/fragrances, electronic items and build a niche themed site within a couple of hours.

Depending on how hot the trend is, you could reap affiliate or CPA commissions for a couple of weeks or even more than a year, if you trendspot correctly.

The other thing is magazine preferences reveal a lot of a person’s personality. Kris and Lee Odden have a fairly strategic/macro type approach (having leading their own respective business organizations), but more so from their choices of the Smithsonian, Forbes, Inc., while younger guys like Shoemoney and Joe Whyte go for more topical/news type publications like Playboy, Wired, Maxim, Stuff.

To propagate this meme, I tag:

• Laura Alter
• Michelle MacPhearson (who was a good sport to take part in the Goals meme)
• Sleepyblogger Robyn Tippins
• Social Traffic Queen Alex Mayo
• PlanetAndrea

I saw this in Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker’s post “Emom Holds Birthday Contest”

Wendy Piersall, owner of eMoms, is celebrating her blog’s one year birthday.

She’s roped in a number of the Elite Retreat faculty to provide prizes and all participants are eligible for a discount coupon for the next event.

The highlight, a phone consultation with Jeremy and Wendy on how to grow your business or blog.

The check Jeremy’s holding is for an Azoogle Ad.

Among the other prizes:

• Aaron Wall’s SEO Book (an excellent resource for Search Engine Optimization)
• A premium membership to Lee Dodd’s Earners Forum

And a number of other prizes.

Contests are one of the oldest and remain one of the best ways to promote your blog, forum or website. (Lee gives away cell phones in contests on some of his forums).

But rather than just give away your own products, you can instead working with other online marketers who’ll sponsor prizes or services. In this way, you’ll build your relationship and lay the ground for future collaborations and joint ventures.

The prize winners are not just the only winners now. As a contest participant, you’ll benefit too. The contest organizer will inevitably come over and take a look at your site if you’ve linked to them. If your content is sticky, you’d gain another reader, with the possibility that you’ll be mentioned on their site at some point.)

So the chances of winning a prize might be relatively small. However, your “win” in intangible benefits can be infinitely greater.

Here’s the link:

–> Wendy Piersall eMom Birthday Party Contest

I was looking through my blog and got tagged by Dawud Miracle for the Goal Setting meme originally started by Alex Shalman and have gone through eMom Wendy Piersall (winner of the recent Elite Retreat ticket)

Having taught life skills and goal setting specifically, I’ve noticed that many don’t include the following criteria: goals have to be:

• Specific: Include a measurement, so you’ll know when you’ve achieved it (a net worth of $x million, rather than merely “really rich!”)
• Time Specific: You need a timeframe. Theoretically we could all be millionaires, even if we’re earning just $1,000 a month. The problem is that at that rate, you might need to work till 305 years to achieve it. So goals don’t mean much without the time factor.
• Realistic: I use a “reality check” factor. If you’re a complete computer idiot, and you’re gunning for $1 million in your first year in Internet Marketing and you can spend 30 minutes a week on this. You might get slammed hard against the wall when you meet Mr Reality.

There’re other criteria too, but I’ll spare you the gory details.

So here’re my goals:

Goals:

• Professional Goal 1: Develop and have ready for launch one of my products by end June 2007. Shooting for 10,000 units sold by Dec 31st, 2007.
• Professional Goal 2: Launch and build a 1,000 strong social community by Dec 31st, 2007
• Professional Goal 3: Achieve a net worth of $5 million by December 31st, 2010.
• Family Goal 1: Continue to work on growing my family to 3 kids by 2009 (I’m 33% there…)
• Family Goal 2: To spend at least an hour of quality time with my wife every evening. (We’re both usually working on multiple projects at the same time.)
• Financial Goal 1: Grow my finances by 10% each year.
• Personal Development Goal 1: Spend at least an hour boning up on my IM knowledge each day.
• Personal Development Goal 2: Spend at least half an hour sorting out and outsourcing the paperwork each day. (It never ends…)

If you choose too, you can set goals dealing with the social, spiritual and other aspects of your life too.

Continuing this meme, I’m tagging:

• Michelle MacPhearson
• Michael Ono
• Richard Ball
• Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker
• Kris Jones

Keep the ball rolling, guys…

While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the practice, I feel that it sets up expectations that the blogger or website owner will have to deliver on once the visitor lands on your page.

If you can keep your readers happy, you’ve laid the foundation for a successful and low cost (possibly free) traffic generation model.

The sad reality is that more than 90% of the sites using such techniques have average (and usually sub-standard) poor content.

At best, this is gimmicky in my opinion and best used for one-off, throwaway adsense-oriented traffic.

But if you’re a serious Internet Marketer in this for the long haul, you’d do much better to build your brand, which means either using your photograph, or an image which represents your online presence.

Iconic Avatars: Michael “GrayWolf” Gray, Jim Kukral, Rasheed Ali, Robyn Tippins, Todd “StuntDubl” Malicoat, Shawn Collins, Chris “Drinkbait” Hooley, Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker.

Credibility and reputation are essential to your long term success, and being consistent in your online branding build rapport with your visitors. Consistent branding will bring you intangible returns in the way of joint ventures which will net you much more than merely driving traffic to an adsense-optimized site.

I don’t know about you, but it would be difficult to take some aspiring marketer who uses a Hooters girl as his icon, seriously, much less consider a joint venture.

PepperJam head honcho Kris Jones and Andrew Wee at Affiliate Summit West, Jan 2007

If you’ve been reading the PepperJamBlog for any length of time, you’d discover a treasure trove of information and can bump up your Internet Marketing efforts.

In his latest post “Affiliate Marketing – Thinking Outside the Box“, Kris dishes out the dirt on how he recently executed a campaign grossing $30,000 in sales, netting $15,000 in profit. And while some Super Affiliates may net six or seven figures in income per month, consider that Kris spent 15 minutes setting up this campaign.

So Kris has made a killing off UGG Boots.

How would he further enhance his efforts?

Using a psychographic approach to define the profile of the customers, perhaps they’re outdoor adventurers.

I’m sure most of them would need socks to go with that. Perhaps a speciality padded sock which minimizes Achilles heel injuries. If they love the great outdoors, they might be looking for a quality compass, or what about a set of walkie talkies?

If they’re buying the boots for winter use, would something like the Oakley Razor Blades be a complimentary product? Or a stylish Thinsulate clothing accessory or jacket?

By profiling your customer base and crossselling and upselling related items to them, you can effectively double and triple your profile, with ZERO acquisition cost (you’re already ‘acquired’ and pre-qualified them with their first purchase).

If you do a survey and collect their preferences, you can get the basis to develop an information product, which address their questions with pinpoint accuracy.

Perhaps boots aren’t your thing?

It’s an easy matter to use a tool like Google Trends to scope out trend hotspots and prepare your campaign to monetize the trend easily.

If nothing else, focusing on the core business basics will keep you very comfortable and if you’re look for inspiration for your next campaign, check out Jo Han Mok’s Internet Millionaire Code.

Sure, everyone may know that it stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, or “Rich Site Summary”. Or if you go back to it’s earlier definition RDF Site Summary.

But what does it all mean?

And is it a new technology.

Again, like blogging, RSS traces it’s roots for a number of years. To 1999 in fact.

RSS is a way of accessing content from blogs and podcasts via a easy to use interface.

While RSS was used to broadcast content from personal blogs previously, increasingly businesses and online marketers are using RSS feeds as a means of generating brand awareness and to promote products and services too.

The bugbear with RSS however, lies in the fact that it requires some techy know how to set up successfully.

Microsoft has announced that the new Windows Vista incorporates RSS support.

Given that I will be holding back on a Vista upgrade for some time (and I suspect others will also), here’re some intermediate solutions.

My preference is to install the Mozilla Thunderbird email client, which incorporates RSS support.

Another program I like is the Blog Explosion RSS Reader.

If you’ve just started out with your blogging efforts, joining Blog Explosion’s free traffic program can give you a head start in generating traffic. It will also give you explosure to other great blogs out there.

What I especially like about Blog Explosion is that besides the traffic that it generates, listing your blog in the Blog Explosion directory creates a Google PageRank backlink to your blog. My particular backlink is rated a PR3.

If you’re prefer an online RSS reader accessible via your web browser:

• Google Reader
• My Yahoo!

The direct benefit of setting up these two services and subscribing to your own feed means that your blog will be spidered by Google and Yahoo regularly and be indexed on these search engines much more easily.

With all that laid out, here’s my biggest peeve about RSS.

Actually it’s more to do with RSS publishers.

Bigger is not always better.

A lot are under the illusion that the bigger, the better.

As Yoda said to Luke Skywalker in the Empire Strikes Back “Size matters not”

I don’t specifically see myself as a designer.

In fact, I’m pretty horrible when it comes to design sometimes.

But take a look at some of the RSS icons I’ve seen on some blogs:

Let’s start with the ones that aren’t effective:

Found in the right sidebar of a blog. The orange, when blown up, looks ghastly. The 3-D effect doesn’t help either.

Still hurts my eyes. Found in the left sidebar of a blog.

Really, it’s too over-the-top.

Do you find it crass?

Perhaps you might agree with:

Taken from the 10 Ways to a Killer Blog series I worked on earlier, originally by Robert Scoble.

Here’re some better implementations of RSS publicity:

Shoemoney‘s a big blogger. You’ll need to hunt to pick up his RSS feed. It’s located in the bottom left corner of his blog.

Pepperjam has a slew of RSS options in their right sidebar. For aesthetic reasons, I’d probably recommend keep it to 3 options, or a maximum of 5. Too many options creates clutter on your blog real estate.

I like Todd Malicoat‘s presentation of his RSS feed. It appears in his right sidebar, above the fold. The orange contrast against the black background is pretty pleasant. As is the handwritten font for “Subscribe”

ProBlogger Darren Rowse has the above information appearing in his left sidebar. The RSS feed is accessible via the XML or feedburner button. Nice, clean, compact design.

BlueHatSEO Eli has a nice presentation of his RSS feed too, appearing just below the header graphic in the right sidebar.

—

If you’re planning to publish a blog and offer your RSS feeds for subscription, the orange icon with the three slanted lines (which originated in the Mozilla Firefox browser) would be most easily recognizable, than the “XML” or “RSS” icons.

As adoption of Windows Vista ramps up, you can be sure that RSS will become a more important technology for content publishers.

Thanks to Shawn Collins and Missy Ward who conceptualized Affiliate Summit and have been grown it from strength-to-strength at about 200 participants in the first AS in 2003 till more than 2,000 at the recently concluded ASW.

It was a great opportunity to meet up face-to-face with a number of the online marketers I’d been reading and talking with over the past few months like ShoeMoney, Scott Jangro, Kris Jones, PlanetAndrea, Jon Fisher from WickedFire and Joe Whyte.

Becky “Webmoxy” Ryan was a friendly and intelligent person to talk to (even though I was deep in thought and seemed to have unintentionally ignored her when she called out a few times).

Maura, Robyn, Andrew Wee at the Pepperjam booth

Shoemoney’s assistant Nicole

Webmoxy Becky Ryan

More surprising still was the fact that a number of affiliate managers and affiliates whom I hadn’t met prior to ASW mentioned they enjoyed reading this blog.

Blogging can be a solitary affair and it’s comforting to have face-to-face validation (which gives a human face to the otherwise clinical awstats’ 6000+ monthly uniques).

Although I missed them, perhaps I’ll have a chance to catch up with Super Affiliate Ros Gardner, BlogKits founder Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson and SleepyBlogger Robyn Tippins at the next event. I heard Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis had to leave Sunday evening for school, so I probably missed them by a hair.

What I greatly appreciated was the opportunity to meet Mike Krongel and his team over at Copeac. They threw a killer party for the WickedFire folks over at the Caramel Loung in the Bellagio.

It’s a great opportunity to have met up with WickedFire founders Jon and Brandon and WF members like John “I like c**k”, SEO_Mike, chrislingle, lerchmo, jDog, DruSam, Surly, Kaveman, Smaxor, Jon Warass, ExEngima, Rick.

Mike Peters from Software Projects had some interesting stories to tell too.

I’ve been listening to some of the post-ASW buzz and one of the issues I’ve heard is that the workshops didn’t provide good information.

I think the major element of a ‘summit’ is to share ideas. And given the time constraint of a 1.5 hour session, I’d doubt it’s fair to compare AS’ workshop sessions with Elite Retreat or other multiple day workshop focused on a single topic like SEO or list building.

I had the opportunity to speak to merchants making their first foray into affiliate marketing and they seemed to have got basic information to follow up on their efforts.

The biggest benefit of ASW is ‘being there’.

And ShoeMoney has rightly pointed out that the best exchange of ideas takes place after the workshop, in the bars and restaurants after the sessions end. In a more relaxed environment, you have an open exchange of ideas and trading information on what works and what doesn’t.

And herein lies the rub, Internet Marketing has more to do with relationship building and personal contact, than just the technology aspect that people generally get obsessed about.

Online marketing is more than composing the best Web copy, or optimizing your landing page or PPC campaign.

If you don’t have grassroot supports from your peers, whether it’s getting feedback on something you’re implementing, or even working together on a project, you can still succeed, it will just take a much longer time.

You can, of course, read about ASW and other events from this blog, though in the long run you’d be missing out on some great networking opportunities.

Affiliate Summit East will be coming up later this year.

Will you be there?

Attendees from the first ER paid $4,500 per head to attend the exclusive event.

The upcoming second ER to be held on 19 and 20th March in San Francisco is raising some hackles with its $4,950 price tag.

I’ve often heard the question on the forums and a number of Internet Marketers have been asking me this question:

Is it too much?

And often I hear the gripe that paying $4,950 which works out to $2,500 per day over the 2 day workshop is too much.

I think there’s a major problem here.

And the problem is with the person asking the question.

See, I have been doing business consulting and training and managing start-ups for the better part of 10 years.

I’ve almost never looked just at how much something costs, because that’s only half the equation.

What’s more, ok, I understate it here, what’s of the utmost importance whether you should invest in the opportunity is your return on your investment (ROI if you want the jargon).

If you spend $1,000 on an investment, what would you like to get out of it? $1,050? $2,000? $10,000?

My personal benchmark has always been to get a minimum 10 times return on my investment.

If I were to spend $5,000 on an opportunity, I’d expect to get at least $50,000 back in net profits.

So the question is whether Elite Retreat is overpriced?

Looking at this issue rationally, value is a function of your return over your investment (Return / Investment).

This are the two constraints on the issue:

1. The investment is fixed ($4,950)
2. The return is not fixed.

The return is determined by what you want to get out of the event.

Speaking to Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney) on the sidelines of Affiliate Summit West, he mentioned that one of the ER participants from the first workshop was now generating $2,000 a day.

Ok, I’d admit that I didn’t nail Shoemoney on whether it was gross or net profit. But even assuming a worst case scenario that it was ‘only’ a 50% net profit, that’s a cool $1,000 a day, or $365,000 a year.

On a $4,000 investment.

So the issue now is whether the ER trainers will be able to deliver on their objectives to bring you to the next level.

This time around, they’ve assembled a cast of trainers comprising:

• Shoemoney (Search Engine Marketing, Branding, PPC, and Arbitrage)
• Kris Jones (Affiliate Marketing and Search Arbitrage)
• Lee Dodd (Community Building and Web Real Estate)
• Aaron Wall (Search Engine Optimization)
• Darren “ProBlogger” Rowse (Blogging and Monetization)
• Neil Patel (Social Media Optimization, Reputation Management, and Viral Marketing)

So between them, I believe they have most of the bases covered. I’d think that if you were more concerned about topics like domaining, copywriting, product creation, which aren’t specifically covered in the presentations (although some of the speakers have experience in these areas), what you can do to ensure your own success is:

1. Do your preliminary research beforehand
2. Do the necessary testing
3. Compile all the questions you have and bring them to ER.

Talk to the panel of trainers and fellow participants and do whatever it takes to get the necessary knowledge to get yourself to the next level.

I’m sure that even if they aren’t able to directly address your query, one of them will be able to direct you to resources to get the information you need.

Will going to ER provide the magic antidote to all your burning questions and make you an overnight millionaire?

Not likely.

Neither will signing up for a myriad of courses, or buying a million dollars worth of ebooks.

What will bring you the success you desire is the determination, perserverance and most importantly, effort, to move yourself one step closer to success.

Obviously, Shoemoney and his team have planned a roadmap for Elite Retreat to make it a major initiative this year with sessions planned in Orlando (May), Chicago (July), Phoenix (Sept), Dallas (Nov).

Should you consider investing the $4,950 for the event?

Only if you see yourself investing the effort necessary to bring yourself $50,000.

You can also read some of the related posts by:

• Kris Jones
• Neil Patel
• Shoemoney
• Lee Dodd
• Aaron Wall
• Darren Rowse

For more details, you can visit the Elite Retreat website or call PlanetAndrea at 1(800) 888-8151.

You don’t already need more content than what you’ve already seen on their blogs and forums, but here’s the difference that makes a difference.

The major obstacle and stumbling block for 99% of online marketers is your mindset.

And it’s not something you can rationalize, but rather an emotional reponse.

Sure, all of us can think we theoretically earn a million dollars a month, but the question is whether you feel you have the ability and are motivated to achieve it.

Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney), Andrew Wee, Jon F (WickedFire)

If you have no expectations about your online earning potential, you’d likely be happy with earning $1.

But from there, whether you hit the $10/day, $100, $1,000 or $10,000 level all depends on the ‘glass ceiling’ you’ve set for yourself.

Internet Marketing is truly a mind game.

Because once you’d set your mind in motion, you will go all out to find the strategies to reach the next level.

Here’s my personal beliefs that will help you reach the next level:

• Never Stop Learning

Things never stay the same. Expect change. And deal with it. Whatever doesn’t stop you will only create a barrier of entry for other.

• Problem-centered or Solution-centered

Are you someone who’s apt to complain or get stressed when a problem arises.

If you shift to a solution-oriented approach when something happens and you’re able to deal with it sooner than the others, you’d have a headstart on your competitors.

• Test, Test and Test

The first step is to take action, the second is to test everything. Never take anything for granted and you could see increases of 10-20% in your results.

The most important attribute, however, is persistence. If you work at something long enough, you might not get the same results you’re aiming for, but you’d be pretty close.