AffiliatesNeeded.Com What's New In Affiliate Marketing

Hi everyone,

As part of my regular research and learning time that I spend each week, I’ve been reading Dan Kennedy’s ‘No BS guide to marketing to the Affluent’ and decided to turn some of my notes from it (and from other research that I’ve done) into a blog post as I thought many of you may find my notes useful.

It isn’t specifically to do with just internet marketing, it’s to do with marketing products or services to the affluent in general.

Enjoy…

==== Who are considered as ‘The Affluent’? ====

Using the figure of household income of $100,000 usd or above as a sign of affluence, according to Wikipedia 15.7% of the USA is considered as affluent.

Further studies in the USA reveal that 50% of affluent people are self employed, while the other 50% achieve their wealth through inheritance, divorce, and well paid highly specialized professions.

==== What do they buy? ====

Affluent customers see the value in investing back into their business. If you can offer them a product that will increase their businesses leads, conversion rates, average $ per customer, and/or increase the number of repeat customers that a business gets, then they will take your offer very seriously.

Affluent customers also spend large amounts of money on luxuries, indulgences, collectors items, unique experiences, their children, status enhancers, stock, gold, silver, real estate, assets, upgrading their home or holiday home (kitchen’s often $100k+ etc). These purchases often give them the "I deserve this" feeling, and the status that comes with their purchase feels like a sense of accomplishment (e.g. owning a Ferrari, a holiday home, or being a member of an elite inner circle membership).

==== Why will they want to buy through YOU? ====

Whether you yourself are affluent or not, you need to present yourself and whatever products or services that you are selling, as elite.

As far as you personally are concerned, make sure that every point of contact that you have with the potential customer is professional, courteous and leaves them feeling confident that you understand them and their desires.

If you can’t afford to have a fancy office, then get a nice suit and come out to meet them in person. If you are selling online then there is no reason why you can’t have a very professional looking website, particularly one that contains a big promise about your product or service, and multiple elements of proof that you can provide what you say you can.

Proof can come in the form of offering a free report, for instance a real estate agent might offer a report on 17 great ways to increase the price your property sells for. Proof can come in the form of testimonials, particularly from people that your potential customer admires or sees as similar to themselves. It can come in many other forms, such as screenshots of you being featured in a major magazine article, or on the news, a review from a celebrity, or even a product demonstration.

Just remember, product demonstrations often backfire, if you do do a product demonstration, make sure you do it in a way that makes your potential customers say "wow", otherwise you are better off sticking to the other elements of proof that will have this effect.

The best proof of all is if you have been referred to them by a friend of theirs. This will happen if you deliver a high quality product or service, and make it a fantastic experience.

Just another tip for selling services via a website (e.g. website design, salesletter writing, seo services, etc). One thing that works really well if you are looking for affluent clients, make your potential customers fill out an application form on your website in order to apply to be your customer.

This weeds out less serious clients, while also adding to that sense of accomplishment on the part of your client when they do finally secure your services.

When selling to an affluent customer price isn’t the major factor, it’s the quality and excellence of your product or service.

You need to make sure that owning your product or joining your service means something. Somehow it should give them a sense of status, whereby owning your product feels like an accomplishment in of itself.

A lot of affluent customers purchase through one vendor over another as a way of showing themselves respect. Affluent people love feeling like they deserve this for all their hard work.

Also, just getting back to pricing for a moment, if you price higher, you can afford to invest more in your product or service, meaning a greater experience for your customer.

Often affluent people want a job done properly, not cheaply, so price isn’t the factor that sways them, it’s their belief in your ability to do the job well and also any positive feelings such as status, or allowing themselves to indulge that comes as a result of being your customer.

I also found it interesting that more people wanted to join Kennedy’s Inner Circle Membership, than when it was called a subscription. People want to be members, and in particular, part of an inner circle, a lot more than they want to be a ‘subscriber’ – I might have to look at that wording, or similar, for some of my membership sites

===

I hope you enjoyed this blog post guys, it’s basically a tidied up version of a bunch of notes that I took while doing some research yesterday.

As always, comments below are most welcomed.

All the best!

Mark Ling

Hi Everyone,

Last September, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit the city that I live in (Christchurch, New Zealand) and caused a lot of damage, although luckily noone was killed (My blog post from last September’s quake is here).

This time on the 22nd of February, we weren’t so lucky. A 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit, and it caused a LOT more damage, injuries and death than the previous quake. It is a total disaster.

Thanks for all of you who have written in asking about how my staff and my family are doing, we are safe, although many have had a lot of damage to their houses and our offices have been damaged too.

The restaurant that my wife and I were going to have dinner at last night was flattened, so we’re lucky the earthquake came in the afternoon and not the evening.

I’ve posted a video below that tells my account, plus includes several photos that I took when I was on my way home from the quake, and also when I was driving to see my mother:

Thanks again for your support everyone, my staff, my family and I all greatly appreciate it.

Kind regards,

Mark Ling

Hey Everyone,

Do you get too many ‘guru’ emails hitting your inbox that it
distracts you away from spending productive time making money online?

Personally, I’m subscribed to over 100 different internet marketing guru’s newsletters.

Some are good, most are spammy, some are appallingly spammy.

With most of them I have set up categories and rules so that the
emails automatically go into folders that are categorized by the guru’s
name.

That way I only take a look through a particular guru’s email when I
have the time, or wish to check out what they’ve been sending out
lately.

There are some people whom I subscribe to that I let go directly
into my inbox, but most of them I have automatically going into
categories, that way I don’t get distracted by stuff.

One problem I hear from many readers is that they don’t know who to
stay subscribed to, who to listen to, which products to buy and so
forth.

Personally, I’m subscribed to a lot of different lists, good and
bad, but I have different motives to most of you. I’m subscribed because
I’m in the IM niche, so when I’m in a JV contest during an IM launch, I
like to know what emails the other people are sending out.

There’s not many lists that I’m subscribed to for the purpose of gaining ‘information’

When I want to learn stuff, I either try to reverse engineer what
other successful people are doing, I buy solid business books from
Amazon.com, I listen to quality business audio books in my car, I talk to other internet millionaire friends of mine on
skype, I listen in on promising sounding webinars or I buy courses from very reputable internet marketers.

It’s fairly rare that I learn something new from a newsletter list
that I’m subscribed to because most people only send out promotions and
don’t actually send out any content in their newsletters. And when they
do send out content, it’s often too newbie to be of interest to me.

Anyway, I’m getting off topic here. What I wanted to give you was
something to help you prevent getting an inbox full of too many offers
and so forth that you miss the good ones and also I’d like to offer you
some tips to prevent you from buying junk products.

Rule #1: Set up a seperate gmail account and let all new
newsletters that you subscribe to go to that account, and categorize
your inbox.

Rule #2: With your regular email inbox, only subscribe to a maximum of 5 newsletters
(and less if you can help it). If someone isn’t in your top 5 ‘gurus’
or newsletters, then unsubscribe and resubsribe using your gmail
account. That way you’ll have less clutter to deal with on a daily
basis. You may even wish to make it part of your daily routine to unsubscribe from one newsletter list each day (and move it over to your gmail).

Rule #3: Beware of buying any product that you don’t understand.
If you come across a salesletter for a product, and it shows a bunch of
income screenshots, then it says that there is some miracle system or
software that creates push button money, or traffic, then make sure that
it explains what that system or software is. Don’t just get blinded by
income screenshots and proof of traffic and testimonials. Don’t get
blinded by statements such as "my system doesn’t involve adwords,
doesn’t involve email marketing, doesn’t involve xyz", those kinds of
statements, while being fine to have in a salescopy, aren’t enough to
tell you what the product is about.

If you don’t understand what you are buying, don’t buy it. I’ve seen
several product launches of awful $37 products where they make it look
like you’re buying some top secret system to drive floods of traffic to
your websites, something you’ve never heard of or seen before, it
doesn’t involve email marketing, nor does it involve ppc, etc etc. Then
you buy the product and find out that you’ve bought a piece of software
that does article submission.

Ok, that’s great, but if you knew what you were buying, you may or
may not have bought that software. Article submission software can be
really good, but don’t just go buy some miraculous traffic generation
software without knowing what it is that you are buying, or you will
find that you’ll regularly be disappointed.

Rule #4: Beware of short emails that lead to a hardsell of a product

If someone has your best interests at heart, and they’ve really
reviewed a great product, then in their email they’ll actually give you
at least some details of what that product is about.

If you get an email that goes something like one of these then beware:

=============================

Subject: Wow, I’m impressed

Hey FIRSTNAME,

This software is amazing, I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s
push button simple and I’m now driving lots of traffic to several of my
websites:

http://linkhere

You can thank me later,

Guru Name

=============================

Subject: Keep this private

Hey FIRSTNAME,

This information is for your eyes only. Don’t share it with anyone else:

http://linkhere

Guru Name

=============================

Ok, if you get the occassional email like that from someone, that’s
fine, but if you’re getting emails like that every single day from
someone, then be very wary.

They are likely just seeing you as a number, they send out short
emails as they are faster and easier to write and they get high click
throughs. They probably haven’t reviewed the product, just the
salespage, so they just look to promote products that ‘convert well’ to
sales, but not necessarily great products that will benefit YOU.

And they mail as often as they can (sometimes 3 times per day) as
they aren’t even thinking of helping you long term, they don’t care
about building a relationship, they just want you to buy something from
them and they want you to do it as soon as possible before you
unsubscribe. I’ve heard some marketers tell me that they "hate
customers" and they don’t want to deal with them, they’d rather just
refund people who ask questions.

Personally I’m all for strong marketing, hype, overpromoting at
times and so forth. So long as it’s a product I believe in. And there
are several good products made by top quality marketers out there, guys
who offer great support too, so I don’t understand why some guys decide
to promote such junk on a daily basis.

I like to picture the person on the other end of my emails as a real
person who I want to see do really well online and in life. Often I read
an email that I’ve just written and think to myself – Would I want my
father reading something like that? (For those who don’t know, he’s
someone that I trained up in internet marketing and is doing well
online)

Rule #5: Stick to 1 or 2 systems at a time – maximum. If you
buy an info product that teaches you how to make money online through
following some system, then that’s great, but don’t keep looking for the
next opportunity. Implement what you learn, good things sometimes take a
little time. Try not to buy more than 2 (and preferably only 1) new
‘make money system’ within any 90 day period. Give yourself the time to
go through it properly and get making money before expanding your
knowledgebase.

It’s like learning to drive a truck, you need to master driving a
car first. You wouldn’t learn to drive and 30 days later, go ahead and
learn to drive a large truck. You’d want to be driving a regular car for
at least 90 days, if not longer, before moving on to another class of
vehicle.

Also, with any system, it will probably take you 2 to 3 times as
long as you first think. Assuming it’s a good system, the money IS still
there, the potential lifestyle is still there, it might just take 3
times as long and twice as much persistence as you first thought.

Rule #6: Buy products that help you in your current plan, and
that teach you things that you know that you need to know. If you
already have a plan, if you already have websites etc, don’t buy brand
new ‘systems’ that are totally different to what you are doing. Buy
products that complement what you are doing.

Many years ago, I got myself making money online without buying info
products. I was largely self taught. But when I did finally start
buying ‘info products’, the first ones I bought were ones that helped me
send more traffic to my websites. I didn’t go ahead and look for some
new magic way of making money online, that would have been a big
distraction, I looked for products that would help me make more money
out of the sites that I already owned, and also taught me skills that I
already understood that I needed to get better at e.g. email marketing,
ppc and so forth.

Rule #7: It’s better to take a leap of faith than to distrust
everyone. There are a lot of ‘gurus’ out there, some are really good,
some bad. Some have great systems, others are rubbish. The fact is,
there is a lot of money being made online, and you can’t waste too much
of your time trying to decide who to trust and who not to. You have to
learn how to take a piece of it for yourself. If you gain success from most of the products you buy, and perhaps some turn out to be rubbish (so you refund those), then that’s better than being too cautious to try at all.

You can follow my rules above to some extent, but all in all, there
are many good systems out there and you get a pretty good idea from the
first couple of days whether or not a product is any good. If it’s bad,
get a refund and try something else. DO stay in this game, DO take
action, and DO persist, DO NOT get put off by obstacles, and remember
…

… Making money online is as simple as learning how to master the following:

Leads (e.g. seo, ppc, ppv, affiliate marketing, email marketing etc)
x
Conversion rates (salesletter writing, email writing, surveying exit traffic, copywriting in general, etc)
x
Average $ per sale (e.g. upsells, recurring, etc)
x
Average # of sales per customer (email marketing, promoting good products, etc)
=
Your Revenue

I hope you enjoyed this blog post, and I hope you realize that this
isn’t meant to be a ‘guru bashing’ post. There are several great
internet marketers out there who provide quality information both in
their newsletters and in their products, and are helping make a lot of
people to do extremely well online. This is simply meant to help you cut
through the crap out there which unfortunately taints our industry and
might hold you up on your path to great success online.

As always comments are welcomed!

Mark

There’s no
denying that social media is getting all of us hooked, and fast. It’s addictive
and irresistible, like candy is for children.

But what
happens when children eat too much candy? A sugar high of course, and
eventually over time it can result in tooth decay.

Are we doing
the same thing as we rush to jump on the social media bandwagon, quickly adding
it into every aspect of our business because it’s fresh, exciting and the cool
thing to do – only for it to one day dawn on us that we’ve done it all wrong?

Sometimes, yes.
If you introduce social media sharing to your website and marketing campaigns
but don’t first fully consider what is right for your business specifically, or
consider the ‘what next’ consequences of doing so, then you’re probably doing
yourself more harm than good.

Let’s look at
a specific scenario: replacing ‘forward to a friend’ with ‘share to social’ in
your email marketing campaign.

Now at first
take, this sounds like a no-brainer – and under the right circumstances, it is.

4 good reasons why Share To Social trumps Forward To A
Friend

1. It is much easier for a user to
share by simply clicking a link (rather than manually entering a friend’s email
address).

2. Sharing to a social media
channel gives far greater exposure to
tens if not hundreds of people, much faster, than by forwarding to one friend.

3. The act of sharing increases
user involvement and brand awareness. Positive interactions such as these build
a greater relationship between your customers or prospects and your business.

4. There is less perceived risk at
sharing content through a social media channel. Some subscribers worry that
websites will spam their friends if they use their forward to a friend web
forms.

Share to
Social isn’t something you want to miss out on if it’s right for you, so let’s
address some basic questions before you jump into this:

Q: Will people
want to share my content with their greater social circle?

A: lot of this
comes down to common sense. If you’re in an affiliate marketing niche such as
yeast infection, save my marriage or even attract women – it seems fairly
unlikely people will be wanting to share your content on Facebook with their
friends. These are situations where sticking with a forward to a friend option
would make more sense.

Q: Is my
target market using social media and which channels?

One day, this
question will probably be redundant. But for now, there are still plenty of
pockets of people who simply don’t use social media, know how to, nor have any
desire to.

The only way
to really be sure on this one is to ask. Collect this data as part of a quick
survey to those on your email list, you might be surprised with the results.
What would be the point of adding a tweet link to your email if only 2% of
subscribers use Twitter?

Once you’ve
done this background work and are ready to implement share to social, the next
question you need to look at is – is it worth your time and effort?

Does content
sharing by your subscribers provide the greatest ROI? Are there alternative
measures you could be spending your time on that would give you a greater
return?

If people are
re-tweeting your content left, right and centre that’s great but does it mean
you need extra resources to accommodate your increased presence on Twitter? Is
it worth it?

What if you enabled share to social on your
content and it got everyone talking about you, but for all the wrong reasons?

These are just
some of the questions you need to consider and monitor carefully when you make
the leap into the social media wonderland. As the reigns of your marketing
campaign are shifted more into the hands of your subscribers, it pays to keep
one thing in mind before you make any radical changes:

You and your
users are at the mercy of the owners of social media sites, whereas email is
not owned by anyone. Sure, passing the bat to your subscribers to maintain your
marketing presence looks like a very tempting candy… but do you know how long
that sweetness will last?

How much
control do you want to have?

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for all the positive messages about the recent earthquake, I appreciate your support, it has been a difficult time here but at least my family, my staff and their families are safe.

One of my companies offices is complete ‘toast’ the other ones are not too bad and we should be back in them in the coming weeks. In the meantime my staff are working from home and some are working from my house.

If you want to read my story of the earthquake, go here.

***

So, today I wanted to give you some tips for those of you who are interested in running your own teleseminars and webinars.

For the rest of this article I’ll refer to them as webinars, but they could just as well be teleseminars as the tips work for both.

Note: These tips work for running webinars in just about any niche (ie not just the ‘make money online’ niche). I’ve run webinars in the dating niche, personal development and other niches with great success. Others have done so in Forex, weight loss, dog training and all sorts of niches. The fact is, getting a bunch of people together and delivering them free live training that is great value, and leaves them wanting more information from you, leads to great sales in any niche.

Here are 7 tips for selling via live teleseminars or webinars:

1. Make sure that the content delivered on the webinar is worth the attendee’s time, whether or not they buy the product that you offer at the end of the webinar. If you fail in this, then they’ll never want to come back to be on another webinar. If you succeed, they’ll not only come back, but they’ll forgive the occassional lower quality webinar and keep coming back. They’ll also be more likely to buy from you and recommend you to others in the future.

Also, by being on a webinar with you, your open rates and conversion rates from your emails that go out to them in the future go up. This is because they feel like they know you better, they know your voice now (and your face if you put it on the start of your webinar) and they ‘hear’ your voice when they read your emails. 

While webinars that do nothing but pitch and sell a product DO convert to sales and DO work, they are not a good long term strategy if you want your attendees to keep coming back. Also, you can run these kinds of webinars, so long as you tell your audience before they come (e.g. if you tell them that the webinar is going to be a live demonstration of a paid software product. If they know what they’re in for, then that’s ok).

When you deliver good content, try not to cram too much into a short time-frame. I’ve been guilty of this in the past, and not only does it lead to less sales at the end of the webinar, it leads to people taking away less value from the webinar than if you’d just covered a few great ideas really well. Usually 2 or 3 big ideas are enough for a great webinar, and within each idea there may be 3 to 10 ‘sub ideas’ that reinforce that main idea. If you have too many big ideas in your webinar, people will suffer from information overload as it’s too much to get them to remember and take away to implement later for such a short space of time.

They’ll also leave earlier as it’ll be too much for many of them to take in and leaves less time for them to get their questions properly answered (assuming you take time for live questions later in the webinar).

2. Don’t cut the close too short. Make sure that you appropriate at least 5 minutes to deliver your close so that you can punch out all the benefits of the product, and also make sure that you put a further 10 minutes aside for live questions about the product.

I almost doubled my webinar conversion rates when I added extra time into them for the close so that people could ask questions about the product. Sometimes people are very close to buying but NEED that urgent question answered first.

3. Have scarcity, either have limited numbers of bonuses OR have time based scarcity. I usually like to have time-based scarcity because I don’t usually like to limit the number of sales that I can make. When you tell people that they have 15 minutes to join a product to gain the bonuses from your live webinar, and that if they join within 48 hours, they’ll gain ‘most’ of the bonuses from your live webinar, but if they join after that, they miss out on the bonuses… that scarcity works really well and it also rewards those who took the time to be there on the live webinar.

4. Make exciting bonuses. If you can’t make them, get some from the product owner, often they’ll have other products of their own that they can offer to you to use as bonuses. If you can’t find those, then you can buy private label rights to a product that you can use as a bonus. Just be careful with private label rights products as some are very low quality and others are pretty good. If it’s not something you think is good value, then refund it and buy another PLR product to use as your bonus. Sometimes you can use price scarcity as a bonus if the person you are interviewing on your webinar (assuming it’s their product) is willing to allow you to sell their product at a discount for their launch.

5. Make the webinar fun, if you are making good money from your webinars, then why not give away some prizes? Mp3 players, ipads, Nintendo Wiis, whatever you think might get people excited about staying all the way to the end of the webinar, and also to give them extra incentive to buy the product in the hope of winning one of your awesome prizes.

I don’t do this on every webinar, but when I offer prizes it has helped get more attendees to stick around to the end of the webinar, and also it has helped conversion rates during the ‘close’ when people know that not only are they buying a fantastic product with great bonuses, but they also have a chance of winning another really cool prize.

6. If you have a guest on your webinar, or if you are the guest on a webinar, don’t be afraid to ask/answer the difficult questions that the audience might throw at you. Usually the ‘curly’ questions are the ones that everyone in the audience are thinking, so they need a good answer to those kinds of questions in order to overcome any objections they may have and if they are answered well, conversion rates on the product you are promoting will skyrocket. Answered poorly will backfire of course, but I hope you are promoting products that are great value that stand up to scrutiny from your audience.

7. Most people are pretty nervous for the first 3 or 4 webinars that they run. This is normal, just think of it as training. Don’t worry if you make any sales or not, this is time for you to learn your craft. Just do it. It’s like driving a car, you won’t learn by reading books, you have to get in the car and start driving several times before you become a good driver. Have fun with it and go well!

I hope that you enjoyed this blog post and that it sparks some interest in you running your own webinars or teleseminars someday.

Please post your comments about this blog post below.

If I get enough comments and interest from you from this particular blog post then I’ll book some time in my schedule to run a live webinar teaching you in detail how to make money from running your own webinars and how to get people on them and so forth.

I’ll even get one of my friends on it who is a genius at hosting and monetizing webinars, but I only want to do this if there is enough interest as I realize while webinars are very lucrative they aren’t for everyone.

All the best!

Mark Ling

Hi everyone,

I have so many dozens (and probably hundreds if I were to count them up) of ideas for profitable online ventures, that I thought, why not just post some of them from time to time on my blog.

I don’t know if this kind of blog post will be of interest to you guys, or if it’ll pose more questions than it answers.

I’m not trying to give you a full on blueprint here, this post is just a braindump of one idea I have for a profitable way of building an affiliate site and it’s more suitable for intermediate readers who have some idea of how to set up a blog, customize it, spin articles and so forth.

Note: If you are completely new to affiliate marketing want a step-by-step blueprint for building profitable affiliate sites, then get AffiloBlueprint, and if you want most of the content done for you, plus a similar blueprint, then get Affilojetpack.

Below is my braindump of a plan for a semi-automated, long term profitable affiliate site.

1. Create 20 spin-ready articles (4×2 spinning). Use Affilorama Premium article spinning tool, or Rapid Rewriter.

2. Register .com domain and set it up as a wordpress blog.

3. Install any theme and customize how you like.

4. Using the spin-ready articles, spin 10 articles and post to the blog. Then each day spin 1 more article (just choose any at random) and then post it on the blog. Queue one per day to go out for a month at the start of each month. Note: each article that gets spun and posted to your blog needs to be reworded slightly to make it optimized for a keyword phrase that has at least 500+ people searching per month for it (and even 2000+ if you can find them).

5. Once a week submit a spin-ready article to www.amautomation.com and make sure to add links to previous blog posts using the correct anchor text. Spin these links so that each article that goes out has the potential of building links to several of these blog posts.

6. Add a popover (delayed) to your blog (use Affilorama Premium popover tool) to gather leads.

7. Insert an Affilojetpack followup sequence (or create your own one)

8. Mail out a live broadcast to your mailing list once a week to let send them back to your blog to check out the latest posts (I believe it’ll help your SEO performance if people keep revisiting your website).

9. Depending on the niche, add CPA, or Clickbank, or Adsense revenue to each post. If you pick out 3 to 10 products at the start, then you can just set up graphics etc to promote each one and just insert it as you need it depending on what is relevant to each post.

10. Do a paid directory submission to yahoo, joeant, and one or two other paid directories. Also use submit2edge.com to submit the site to 100 directories. Occassionally use submit2edge.com to do article writing and submission to build more links.

Using this system, you’ll be building a semi-automatic authority site.

Also, you should switch to using unique articles every day once the site pays for itself.

This system will work better for markets that have a lot of long tail search terms, e.g. Dog training (german shepherd aggression, golden retriever jumping, stop dog barking, stop dog chewing, puppy biting, poodle house training, etc, etc).

It may also work well for phrases that go well with city names, e.g. learn guitar in new york, learn guitar in chicago, learn guitar in miami, etc.

I hope you enjoy this post, if you like it I’ll do more like this in the future. If not, I’ll stick to the more regular, easier to follow, blog posts

Mark

The many hidden (and not so hidden) talents of our members have not gone unnoticed by the team here at Affilorama. We think that you’re all pretty special, and we’re lucky to have a supportive community where people are happy to help each other out.

So, we thought this is the perfect place for our members to make a bit of extra cash by lending a helping hand – AND the perfect place for our members to easily find services offering exactly what they’re after!

This is how our brand new corner of the forum was born – a place for our members to connect with each other to offer and find services. We’ve called it Affilorama Services.

What kind of services are we talking about?

Well,
this is an affiliate marketing website, so the services that are best offered here are those that can help out affiliate marketers, and
especially those relevant to our training products like
AffiloJetpack and AffiloBlueprint. Here are a few ideas to get the ball
rolling…

Writing services

• Are you specialized at writing in particular niches?
• Can you rewrite articles faster than you can read them?
• Do you have a knack for writing great sales copy or banner copy that converts?
• Maybe you’re a fast typist who can transcribe video and audio?

These will go down a treat with our AffiloBlueprint and AffiloJetpack members – offer your service now!

Design services

• Fancy yourself as a talented cartoonist?
• Or really good at making animated banners?
• Like to create eBook and 3D covers?
• Maybe you’re an all-round talented web designer who can offer the whole package?

Website creation services

• Are you an expert in working with Xsite Pro or WordPress?
• Able to write code really well in a specific language?
• Maybe you’re an expert in putting together AffiloJetpack or AffiloBlueprint sites

SEO, Marketing, and more

• Are you a link building pro?
• A fantastic website critic?
• Maybe you’re skilled in website optimization and usability design?
• Good at video creation?
• Social Media guru?

… How else can you help? Offer it now!

So, you’ve got a service to offer?

Great, offering your service on Affilorama Services is really simple.

All you need to do is create a new thread in ‘Affilorama Services’ that follows the following example ad:

=====================================================================================
Thread Subject: Setup of 1x AffiloJetpack site (AffiloJetpack members only) – $20
(Must contain a description of the service you’re offering, and the price.)

Thread content: (Should contain the details below).

Price: $20 USD (This should be stated in USD only)
Timeframe: 7 days
Paypal Address: simon@domain.com Please use your Affilorama username as reference on payment.

Description: Please provide a clear, detailed description of the service you are
offering and what the customer can expect in terms of quality, and
actual work completed.

=====================================================================================

What else should I know?

You must meet a few basic requirements before you can offer a service, and these include using Paypal as a safe payment provider, and having an Affilorama forum post count of at least 20.

If you’re looking for a service, please note that ‘services wanted’ type posts are not permitted, you can only use the forum to register your interest with advertised service providers. For more details on the specifics, please read the post How to Offer a Service.

We are excited to be introducing this new feature for our members, and want the forum to
serve as a convenient place for you to offer and find services.
Please help us to keep this a productive and beneficial place for all by
respecting our terms.

Visit the forum now, or see you there later!

Originally a YO Blog submission from Affilorama member James Pruitt, this is a must read post for all affiliate marketers!

The more time I spend around the web, the more I see people talking about their own secret to online success, and usually, what they are telling people is so full of rubbish that it makes my head spin.

You see, the reason most people fail is not because they used the wrong system, or didnt buy the right tools. That’s all hype that people spew to make you feel bad and buy their latest new product. The fact is that the reason people fail is because they focus on the wrong things.

In order to understand the real secret to online success, I have to strip away the lies that people have used to deceive you. Before you can understand what is really going on, you have to STRIP AWAY all the bad information that people have told you so that you rip out your wallet and spend some cash.

The biggest secret to online success has nothing to do with how you market your site but it is about what you spend your time doing. In order to illustrate my point, I am going to break some of the biggest marketing myths online. I am going to touch a lot of nerves here, but please, keep on reading and you will see what I am talking about by the end.

The Money IS NOT in the List

Email marketing is really popular, and if you have been online for more than a day or two, you have probably heard this said before. In fact, I have said it myself.

However, the fact is, I know people with lists 100 times the size of mine that make less from that list than I do. So, obviously the money is not in the list, or else those people would never have to work again.

Highly Searched Keywords Are NOT The Secret

Keywords are important, but you need a new understanding of keywords in order to really succeed. You see, when most people look at keywords they are looking at what was popular LAST MONTH, not what will be popular in the future. Although some topics tend to be popular over time, you can actually make a lot of money by creating a keyword.

This is especially true when creating a domain.

I see people every day saying you have to buy a domain based around popular keywords. But, if you look at the most popular names online, they are NOT keyword optimized (at least they wern’t until the buzz around them became so HUGE everyone was talking about them!)

Now, I have been called a liar on this count, but let’s take a look at some of the most popular names online, and see how people have created keywords.

One example relates to search. 10 Years ago, if you were trying to learn about how people search online, who would think to look for a name like GOOGLE? It’s not even a word, and says nothing about online search. But, today, it is synonymous with online search, and you wouldn’t even think about search without the name coming up.

Two more quick examples come to mind when it comes to social networking as well. One is Facebook, which I do not believe was a highly searched term more than 5 years ago, and the other is Twitter. These two names are now big daddy’s of social networking, but they were NOT highly thought out keyword domains.

The reason they are popular has nothing to do with their keywords, it was because of what they did that impacted people.

Owning Your Website is NOT a secret!

Many people will tell you (and I often agree) that for long term success online, you need your own website. But, at the same time, I personally know about a dozen people that are making a full time living online, and see no reason to go out and build their own site. Now, personally, I would rather have that asset, and I think everyone should have a site of their own, because it is really helpful in leveraging the real secret to online success. But, you can find success online without spending a dime.

Search engines are NOT the best source of free traffic!

Now this one will spark off a round of debate that will never be resolved. But, the fact is that although search engines are a great source of traffic, and you should try to get at least some of your traffic there, if you are willing to spend some time on your business, you can find a lot of traffic without relying on the search engines. In order to do that, you have to understand the real secret.

Now, What is the Real Secret to Online Success?

Now that I have everyone up in arms, I want to talk about what you really need. You see, everything that I mentioned above will HELP you to succeed, but they really are not the true secret behind online success. These are simply methods that we use to achieve success in our efforts.

The real secret to online success (or ANY business really), which all the gurus know is really simple. It is the one thing they have that you don’t if you aren’t making any money. This one tip is going to take a whole new way to look at your business. SO, here it is…

Build RELATIONSHIPS!!!

Did I say that loud enough?

That’s all it takes to make it in this business. One reason I succeed where others fail is because I see the relationships that I am building. What I see most people doing online does more to destroy relationships than to build them.

Everything that you do should center around the relationships. I know people who own their own sites getting loads of traffic and yet not making any money. Yet I know people without a website of their own making loads of cash every month.

I know people with hundreds of thousands of people on an email list, yet they are barely able to make a few hundred dollars a month. Because they don’t have a good relationship with their list. It doesn’t take much to get a subscriber, but it takes a lot more to keep them and get them to trust you over time.

When it comes to search engines, you can get all the rankings you want, but if you don’t build trust with people when they land on your site, you have wasted your time and theirs. Also, you can get loads of traffic without any rankings in the search engines at all (and without spending hours and hours, or thousands of dollars, spinning articles and slaving away over boring SEO tactics meant to trick the search engines into believing people like the pile of junk you call a website).

In fact, this attitude that ‘it’s all about the sale’ and not about the relationship, is a huge factor in the HIGH failure rate. I have seen people come out and make thousands of dollars, and then disappear forever because they got caught scamming, promoting garbage, and nobody would trust them.

The money isn’t in your email list, it’s in the relationship you have with your email list. If you provide a lot of value and quality, you build trust. If you always make sure that you promote products that deliver what they promise, and don’t over hype themselves (which is, unfortunately, getting harder and harder to find) then you build that relationship. If you promote junk just because it has a high commission, or promote something based solely on the name of the product, without knowing what is inside, you can destroy your relationships, and those people won’t buy from you again.

Also, you can get all the high search engine rankings you want. I see this one all the time. I have watched people spend months to get a ranking for a really big keyword, and one HIGHLY targeted to buyers, yet fail to make a dime from all their efforts.

These are the people who you will see daily in the forums claiming that IM is all a scam, and you can’t make money doing all this. The reason why is because they can’t take responsibility for the fact that THEY failed to build trust and respect with people along the way.

Now, I have built sites using Mark’s Affiloblueprint and Affilojetpack systems, I have made money with BlogSuccess, I have built sites with many other methods. I have used article marketing, article spinning, forum marketing, blog commenting, and many of the popular methods to get people to my sites.

I am no guru but I do consider myself to be successful – although I could be making a lot more than I do right now.

But, I think the reason I have succeeded where others fails is because my focus has always been on building the relationship wherever I go. In forums, blogs, articles I post on directories, I am always asking how this affects the relationships that I have or want to build with the people who will read it.

Because of that, I don’t spin junk just for backlinks, (although I do like article spinning, and by spinning high quality articles I get a lot of leverage out of everything that I write). And, I wind up getting higher rankings faster, and usually don’t even need search engines to get traffic to my sites. I actually pay attention to the sites I use for link building, and figure out how to engage those people on that site. I often don’t even worry about search engines for most of my sites anymore.

I focus on building relationships, and sending people to my sites. This helped me to develop a social marketing strategy, that explodes traffic to my sites, as well as increasing my search rankings.

Now, that is not to say that you should ignore SEO, email marketing, the benefits of building your own sites, or picking the right keywords. However, you must realize that all those things are simply techniques you can use to do what is really important. For example, I know people who rely on SEO to build a list, and focus all their attention on building the relationship with that list.

These people make a lot of money doing that. But, it’s not about the list, or the keywords they targeted. What made them succeed where others failed at the same thing is the relationships they built in the process.

Another important point is to remember that relationship building is not JUST with potential customers. You need to build relationships with other website owners as well, especially ones in the same or similar niches.

Most people see another website, and all they think about is competition, and someone they have to beat. This makes the industry a cutthroat world, where it is every man for themselves. If you have this attitude, you are dooming yourself. You may make millions of dollars, but you will still be a failure in my book. It’s not about how much money you make, but how fulfilled your life is at the end of the day. The real secret to online success is in how you build relationships and get people going.

So, what is hampering your relationships? What are you missing that could improve the relationships that you have built online?