The Affiliate Lifestyle Blog

You’ve heard the saying… “Work ON your business.. Not IN Your Business!”

Quite simply, if you are not outsourcing nearly everything but your core compentency, then YOU are the bottleneck in your business!

It’s way to easy for us to outsource.. My favorite place is Rentacoder. Hire a designer, copywriter, coder, whatever you need.. It’s cheap, efficient, and once you start outsourcing the crap you don’t want to do you will never look back!

The next subject I want to talk about is SYSTEMS.

It’s so important for us affiliates to create systems to our business. If we are hoping around from one thing to the next we will never create a system which we can duplicate over and over again…

If you can’t write down your business model on a NAPKIN.. You don’t have a business model!

If you can’t leave your business for at least a week or two without your business collapsing.. You don’t have a business.. You have a J-O-B!

Affiliate marketing is about LEVERAGE.

We need to leverage these guys and gals in India who will work for $10 bucks an hour…

We need to leverage our time using Basecamp..

You get the point.

Now you know what to do.. Get to it!

I was recently asked this famous question:

“I’m just starting in the industry with $500 bucks– what do I do?”

Here’s what I’d suggest:

1) What subject do you know the most about? Everyone is a specialist in something– do you know about guitars? Car washing cleaners? Web hosting? (Those are just 3 examples from people I’ve spoken with recently)

2) Find 4 products in your market that have affiliate programs that you can review on your site..

You can do a google search for “myhobby affiliate program”..

Join 3 or 4 of these affiliate programs/networks.

With most niches, you can find several interesting products to review.

3) Create a review site comparing these products. A review site provides helpful information to move the visitor closer to a buying decision. You can brand yourself as an expert on this topic and create an auto responder series which offers a free report and additional information about the topic.

(see keywordresearching.com or identitytheftkiller.com for an example of my review sites.)

4) Drive traffic to your site using Google Adwords. Bid on keywords such as the names of the products you are reviewing on your site. Remember, you can also bid on the domain names of these products as keywords in your Adwords campaign..

Google provides a free Adwords Learning Center

Although it may be a challenging, you will learn a lot about the two most important aspects of affiliate marketing: driving traffic and converting that traffic into sales.

You may also want to consider “direct linking” which is when you have no website and set up a Google ad which points directly to the offer you are promoting. This is also a good way to start since it will help you develop a better understanding of Adwords without having to create your own site.

I’ve had a fantastic time in Beijing the past week and blessed with unbelievable Olympic seats. I went to 5 events in total: Men’s Weightlifting, Argentina v. Brazil semi-final soccer, USA v. Argentina Basketball Semi-finals, Athletics (saw Bolt break 200M record), & Boxing Finals.

USA v. Argentina match..

Boxing (front row seats!)..

The Great Wall…

Care for Starfish on a Stick?

Feeding the bears..

I’m heading back to Shanghai tonight and then leaving back to Florida on September 2nd to get my butt in gear for some serious affiliate marketing!

I just got back from the Athletics Olympic event tonight held at “Bird’s Nest” stadium, featuring some qualifying, semi-final, and final events– including the 200M world record setting time of 19.30 by Jamaican runner Usain Bolt:

I scored a great ticket for the event, Sector A, Tier 1, Row 24, right next to the finish line and medal ceremonies!

Tonight I grabbed a Argentina v. Brazil semifinals soccer ticket. It was a pretty fun game to be at, considering these are two of the best teams in the world facing off.

Here’s a short video:

Tomorrow I’m hoping to get a ticket for the track & field finals.

Overall, the atmosphere in Beijing is fantastic and I’ve met a lot of fun people

So I’m sitting at home yesterday in Shanghai, thinking to myself “I’m 10 hours away from the Olympics in Beijing.. I have an internet business.. I’m getting my butt to Beijing!”

I call my superhero Chinese friend Jay, and within 2 hours I have a train ticket and a booked apartment with high speed internet in Beijing for a week!

I arrived this morning, dropped my bags off in my apartment and logged into Craigslist. There are dozens of scalpers selling tickets between $50-$4000/event. I got a good deal on Row 5 seats to go see Weight Lifting

After that, I headed to the market to pick up some groceries:

Interesting stuff.. But not really my taste!

I’ll try to pick up a few Olympic tickets while I’m here. Maybe check out the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, and a few other places.

I’m already enjoying Beijing a lot more than Shanghai. They really did a fantastic job revamping the city for the Olympics. Beijing is also the cultural center and has some trees and parks (which is rare in Shanghai).

I’ll try to keep you guys updated in the next few days.

I just received word from Shawn that ALL the Affiliate Summit slideshows are now online!

Of course, check out my friend Amit’s Super Affiliate Presentation. His presentation is titled “PPC Super Affiliate Strategies You Must Know”

Amit covers some excellent tips. Especially review the slide on bidding strategy by position. He makes a well taken point that if you bid too low, your keywords may be in poor position for many of the top converting terms in your niche.

Therefore, you should raise your bid prices for keywords in position 8+ during your “testing period.” After a month, you can optimize/delete the poor performing keywords.

I just started reviewing the slides so I’ll let you know if I find some gems.

Click Here For All The Affiliate Summit Presentations.

There are hundreds of affiliate networks. On each network, there can be hundreds of affiliate offers.

How do you possibly figure out which affiliate offer to promote?

Here are a few of my evaluation criteria:

1) Does the offer have brand equity (Is the company well known?)

I suppose this isn’t a requirement, but I’ve always had success promoting branded offers. I tend to stay away from email submit/zip submit offers which often have shady business practices.

The reason is to reduce risk. Why promote a sketchy offer (usually hosted on a shady affiliate network) that might not pay you or will “shave” your leads.. when you can just as easily work with a reputable company on a legitimate network?

2) How much search volume is in the niche?

Use the new Search Volume feature in Google’s Keyword tool & make sure that the top keyword phrase for your niche has a search volume of at least 2,000,000+++/Month.

I would rather take a big bite out of a big pie than play in niches with little search volume. There are plenty of great niches with high search volume. Why would you want to artificially limit yourself and make it more difficult to expand your offer in the future?

3) Are other affiliates having success with this offer?

This is huge and it’s taken me a long time to learn. Try to find offers that appear in Adwords over a long period of time. I use iSpionage for this type of competitive analysis.

Again, the reason is to reduce risk. Let other affiliates waste their own money on untested offers– just watch how long they stick around in PPC.

4) How much value does the offer provide to users?

When you are providing value to others, you will do well. This applies to life and to choosing affiliate offers. If you find an offer that actually provides legitimate value, it will be more long-term and stable– and makes good business sense.

5) How large is the “Keyword Universe”?

I’ve discussed the concept of the “keyword universe” in the past. Dating has a huge keyword universe because there are millions of phrases people might type into Google when looking for dating information. However, “swimming pool quotes” has a poor keyword universe because there are very few ways to describe the topic/offer.

So what criteria do you use for choosing offers?

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In this business, we must FAIL FAST! This means taking massive and continuous action using the principle of fast iteration.

Benefits of Fast Iterations

• Fail Fast

  A major benefit of fast iteration is you also fail fast. Failing fast means you invest less time in the things that don’t work. If you quickly find out what works and what doesn’t work, then you take action to turn it into something that does work.

  Ironically, teams that fail fast improve as fast, if not faster, than those who try to get it right the first time. The reason is simple: Teams trying to get it right the first time fail as often as everyone else does. However, when they fail, they fail really slowly and struggle to pinpoint problems because they’ve changed so much at once, making it harder to identify solutions

• More Experimentation

  The faster you fail, the more experimentation you can do. You can try out ideas that might not have a lot of support, but could be potential winners. This allows for an innovative environment.

  Perhaps you’ve heard of Google’s 20% time? They expect their engineers to work 20% of their time on a personal project — an experiment they find personally interesting. This program has the effect of bootstrapping experimentation, so it will happen more often.

• Learn Quickly

  We’ve all had the experience of sitting in meetings arguing whether something will work or not. Usually, both sides just don’t have enough data to go on, and they end up going with their gut or with the loudest arguer (for better or worse). Fast iteration helps solve this problem by giving developers a platform on which they can test quickly, helping to collect data about any outstanding questions instead of resorting to opinionated arguments.

• Provide Continuing Interest

  In addition to improving your design, fast iterations may have a psychological effect on users. Those users who use your app with any frequency will notice the changes, and if the good ones stick, they’ll appreciate your ongoing efforts to improve.

  The best teams not only design the changes, but design the process for introducing the change. They experiment with methods to overcome the users’ natural resistance to change, providing migration paths and clear benefits for each improvement.

• Reduced Risk

  Quickly iterating helps reduce risk during design. If teams can make many small changes instead of a few larger ones, they mitigate risk because they know which changes have what effect. If a design team makes many changes at once, they have a harder time knowing which parts work and which parts don’t. When you make only one or two changes at a time, you know immediately what effect it has. Reducing risk is a valuable outcome of moving to fast iteration.