Affiliate Marketing in a Nutshell

What exactly is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is the single fastest growth industry on the Internet. It’s also true that affiliate marketing is one of the fastest and most creative ways to make money and have a career on the Internet.

Simply put, affiliate marketing is selling products on a commission basis. You own a business that advertises and sells products for other companies. You may have a product of your own to begin with or not. The things that a successful affiliate marketer must have are:

Your website is the jumping off point of all your marketing efforts. So the first step in any successful affiliate marketing business is building a good, credible and professional looking website. You must build a user-friendly website, which will attract your prospects and motivate them to click on the links to the products and services you are promoting and make a purchase. There are companies whose business is building websites that you can hire to build one for you.

You must find products to sell, you must be able to determine whether there is a demand for those products and if people will actually buy them.  You may either have your own original product or products that are made by others. Which ever way you go, you must believe in the products.

It will be necessary for you to become an adept advertiser and be able to tell whether the advertising you are paying for is producing more income for you than the advertising is costing you.

It is necessary that you have good mathematical skills. You will need to be able to track your sales and determine profit, as well as, see to it that your suppliers are paid in full and on time.

You need the full and unwavering support of your family so that you can devote the time and energy necessary to launch your affiliate marketing business.

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Hi,

Everybody knows who Chris Carpenter is, and most of us have
read his Google Cash ebook.  We read his first edition in 2003,
and he has been updating it ever since, always documenting
the best practices for affiliate marketers.

Now that Internet video is here, Chris has created a new
video home study course, Google Cash 4.

For 6 years, Chris has been making over $30,000 in profits each
and every month selling affiliate products with PPC advertising.

Google Cash 4 is the culmination of all his best practices, and
this course has been almost a year in the making! 

You can check it out here:

http://launch.gcdetective.com/

 Read the rest of this entry

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“I’ve always treated the first two years of Digital Photography School as its launch phase.”

This was a statement that I made in a session at Blog World Expo that I’ve been asked about many times since – so I thought I’d expand upon it a little here in a post.

2006-2008: The Launch of Digital Photography School

I launched DPS back in April of 2006 (I first spoke about it here on ProBlogger in one of my first video posts). As you’ll see from that initial post – I always saw DPS as something of an experiment and a long term project. Having built numerous blogs before starting that one I new that building a blog to it’s potential takes a lot of time and hard work.

As a result, I gave myself a goal to get that blog two years to get through it’s ‘launch phase’.

That might seem like a long time to get a blog up and running but for me the ‘launch phase’ meant more than simply getting the blog designed and announcing it – for me the ‘launch’ is all about these sorts of things:

• building a foundation of solid content (the blog now has 713 posts, most of which are ‘how to’ or ‘tutorial’ style content)
• getting an initial design up (I launched with a free design and quickly upgraded to a purpose built one. It’s now dated and we’ve outgrown it – but it has served us well).
• building a loyal readership and subscribers (the blog is now read by around a million readers a month and subscribed to by over 100,000. The forum has around 200,000 visitors a month.)
• building community (this takes time. Initially I did it with a Flickr group and then leveraged that to start a forum – now with 23,000 members).
• building a ‘list‘ (at the heart of DPS is a newsletter which drives traffic and builds community. It is sent to around 48,000 subscribers per week).
• establishing a publishing routine (I started off posting 3 times a week and have built it up to posting 7 times a week)
• building a content creation team (originally I wrote every post – now the blog is written by a team of 5 paid writers (each doing one post per week) and a number of regular guest contributers)
• building a team of community leaders (the forum is moderated by a wonderful team of voluntary members)
• building relationships with other bloggers and partners (something I was slow doing, mainly due to being time poor – more recently however I’ve been more intentional building relationships with others in the industry)
• experimenting with monetization – (making money from the site hasn’t been high on my priority list to this point – rather in this launch phase it has been more about working out what types of monetization works and what the community responds to. The site does make money, but more importantly I’ve been learning about monetization)

Most bloggers probably don’t see a lot of this as a ‘launch phase’ – but for me it has definitely been more about building foundations for what is to come than seeing anything I’ve done so far as an ‘end result’.

While I’m really happy with (and surprised by) what we’ve achieved so far at DPS – seeing it as being in it’s launch phase reminds me to keep lifting my sights and to keep on building and dreaming.

One of the Results of Building Good Foundations

Over the last few months I’ve been approached on 3 occasions by potential buyers of DPS. It has actually been quite strange because they all came very quickly and quite out of the blue. The offers ranged quite considerably in terms of numbers but a couple were tempting.

In each case the potential buyer commented that they wanted to buy DPS because it was ’solid’. Each one was less interested in what the site was making in terms of income or how much raw traffic it had than other factors. They were looking more at things like brand, community, reader loyalty, influence, reader morale and user participation.

In fact what surprised me is that the valuations that they put on the site (very high six figure sums) were not based upon what it was currently earning at all. They made offers based upon these other factors – factors that made their offers much higher than a valuation based upon traffic or monthly income alone.

What Will Phase 2 Look Like?

While a couple of the offers were very tempting I realized as i deliberated that the potential for DPS was far greater than what it had yet achieved. I’ve only just begun. To sell now tempted me (and I probably would have sold at the right price) but I realized that for me to take it beyond where it has grown to will see it rise exponentially in value.

It has been 2.5 years now since officially launching the site – so it’s now time to move into the next ‘phase’.

I’m not ready to fully announce all of the details of the next phase of DPS – however it will involve a redesign (hopefully to go live around the end of the year) and a fairly significant ‘expansion’. In essence the way I’m viewing the last 2.5 years is that I’ve been building foundations and that now it is time to expand and leverage what has already been built.

To do so means significant investment back into the site financially but with the solid base of readership, community and relationships that I’ve been working hard to build I’m pretty confident that Phase 2 will be successful. I’m also really excited about what’s coming!

Build Solid Foundations

When I speak with many bloggers I get the feeling that all they’re really thinking about is growing traffic and subscriber numbers as fast as possible. While these are definitely things to work hard on I attempt to convey to them that there are other ‘foundations’ that need to be built into a blog than just traffic.

Most bloggers put a lot of energy into building blogs with high readership – but how about setting goals and strategies in place for some of the other areas mentioned above?

• Take a long term view of your blogging
• Take your time to build strong foundations that go beyond traffic and income

As you do these two things you’ll put yourself in a position to build a site of significance.

Tags: blog tips, make money blogging, selling blogs

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In my last blog post, I talked with you about how the live 24 hour Ustream video broadcast played a MAJOR part in the success of our GPS Coaching Program launch.

In fact, it almost overshadowed everything else–to the point where we had to scramble to make some last-minute tactical changes to the launch sequence.

The video broadcast was bigger than any of us had ever imagined. I even suggested that you put one together to promote your own business, and several of you chimed in to say you were planning to do exactly that.

Well, as it always goes in this business, what was once groundbreaking has now become the norm…

Because in the past several weeks, I’ve seen a number of marketers announcing their own Ustream broadcasts.

They’re seeing the tremendous potential to reach thousands of viewers at once. And they realize how easily it can be done (not to mention the fact that it’s FREE).

So these action-takers are running full speed ahead. And it only goes to prove the point I was making with Silver Bullet #6 inside "The Uncertainty Syndrome: Entrepreneur’s Emergency".

You remember that one, right? (waiting while everyone scrambles for their copy) Okay, I’ll let you off the hook…

Silver Bullet #6 talked about embracing the awesome power of social psychological marketing. And the Ustream broadcast portrayed this perfectly in several aspects…

• First of all, it brought people together in an entirely new and different way. Not only was everyone watching the screen, they were submitting questions and making comments in real time.

  Some of those comments were funny, some rude, some outrageous, and some completely inappropriate. But the very fact that you could instantly talk with a thousand other people about something that was happening RIGHT NOW was truly remarkable…and more than a little frightening.

  Because if a few of you didn’t like what I was saying, you could respond with negative comments. Which might have led to a few more jumping in. Then a few more. And before you know it, we might have had a virtual Rich Schefren hate-fest going on.

  But in the same respect, it could go the complete opposite direction. All it takes is a few people to become raving fans, and others will follow. This turns into a mass of die-hard believers who will eat up any word you say. And before you can say Barack Obama, you’ve achieved maven status in your market.

  (Not to say I’m an Obama fan, but social marketing has played a MAJOR part in his lightning fast rise to prominence…and very well may get him elected President).

• Secondly. the live 24-hour Q and A broke new ground by offering a different way to market. Yes, there had been similar broadcasts, but never for an entire day straight. And never without pitching a high end product.

  We wanted to make this very simple and straightforward. So we opened our offices (and our lives) to the world while answering some questions and directing viewers to download a free report.

  But as the word got out to what I was doing, it spread throughout the IM world and brought thousands of curious visitors our way. And once they got there and saw all the others chatting inside, they felt like they were a part of the group.

  So this was social marketing in its purest form–pulling thousands together to create an event that generated a monster buzz that pulled EVEN MORE thousands into the group.

• Finally, the broadcast spawned a legion of followers in my footsteps–much like the original manifesto did.

  When the Manifesto hit the web and became an overnight sensation, we were suddenly inundated with a tidal wave of "manifestos" from every conceivable angle and niche.

  Copywriting. Traffic generation. Blogging. Email marketing, You name it–somebody wrote it. A few of them even blatantly ripped off my design, making only minor changes before publishing it as their own.

  So we knew we were onto something big. And we got that very same feeling after signing off from the broadcast.

So what should you takeaway from this?

Simple–take full advantage of the social marketing landscape and the opportunities it presents you. And don’t be afraid to try something new, something different.

For example, when I was pondering the manifesto idea, more than one prominent marketer told me I was out of my mind for handing out all that powerful info for free.

"Are you CRAZY, Rich?, they cried. "You can get 97 bucks for this easy–if not more!"

But I had a revolutionary idea: Give it away, build a following of die-hard believers, then market to those people.

And guess what? It worked out pretty darn well. But it didn’t happen with just one person. Or two. Or even two thousand.

It happened with ALL those people telling ALL their friends how much they dug the report. And they told theirs. And so on. And so on.

In other words, social marketing gave my manifesto life….and that life has changed me and my business forever.

Same deal with the 24 hour Ustream video. When somebody threw it out there on a pre-launch brainstorming call, I heard more than a little chuckling. In fact, somebody began comparing me to Jerry Lewis and his telethon.

But the more we fleshed it out, the more potential we saw this thing having. And the more we started loving the idea…

Next thing you know, we’ve got 27,000 people logging on to watch me barrel through 26 hours of non-stop Q and A. And they gobbled up every minute of it.

See what I mean?

And what’s really cool about all this is we’re not stopping there…

Right now, we’re testing some new, breakthrough technologies inside our GPS coaching program. And the initial reports are all thumbs up!

Soon, the word will get out and social marketing will kick in once again. And just like that, everyone will be using this stuff to help establish their name and grow their businesses.

Kind of like a content-rich free report. Or a 24 hour online broadcast.

So tap into what’s at your disposal and pump it for all its worth. Because Silver Bullet #6 may just lead you to a GOLD MINE.

To Higher Profits,

Rich

P.S. How’s social marketing working for you? Are you experiencing some mind-blowing results? Or do you find yourself still struggling with Constraint #6–following the same outdated marketing tactics?

Let me know in the comments section below. I’d love to hear your story.

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