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Now I’m sure all of you are familiar with the 20/80 principle, that 80 percents or results come from 20% of efforts, 80% of outputs come from 20% of inputs, 80% of effects come from 20% of causes, etc, etc.

Now affiliate marketing is no different. You may have heard that 2% of affiliates make 95% of the commissions and profits! That’s one REALLY skewed distribution.

I think by understanding WHY, 2% of affiliates-the super affiliates-clean up with the remaining 98% are fighting for the table scraps, we can understand what differentiates a super affiliate from an average affiliate.

Now I know there’s some affiliates out there that believe there’s some super-secret cabal of super affiliates that are getting special treatment from merchants, and therefore are able to beat up all the little guys, steal their lunch money, and laugh all the way to the bank.

Sorry, there’s no conspiracy!

I started out just like everyone else. Actually, I take that back, I didn’t start like everyone else, I started a notch below. When I started this business I didn’t know how to make a simple html page that says: “Hello world!”

Just a few weeks ago I learned how to setup an RSS reader. I’m NOT joking.

So we can rule out programming & web designing expertise as criteria for being a super affiliate.

So here’s what I believe separates most affiliates from the top 2% of super affiliates who rake in all the profits:

#1 VISION

Having a big vision backed with a burning desire, of what you want out of this business is absolutely essential to success. I hated my job, and was absolutely determined to do whatever it took to learn this business and quit my job as soon as possible.

I attacked affiliate marketing with a vengeance. And admittedly I quit my job a few month sooner than I should have, but I didn’t care, because I knew the best way to guarantee success to BURN YOUR BRIDGES!

Now don’t be stupid and quit your job tomorrow, if you’re not making a cent in affiliate marketing. At the same time don’t hold onto your job forever waiting for the ‘right time.’

No time is going to be the perfect time, JUST DO IT!

Do you know what drives you to build your affiliate marketing business? Most affiliates don’t have a crystal clear vision of what they want, and their vision is very small, like making $500/month profit.

I’m sorry but $500/month is not a goal that will drive most affiliates to do whatever it takes to succeed. As a result of having a mickey mouse goal, most affiliates don’t have that fire inside of them to take their affiliate business to next level.

I started my business with a goal of making $500/month profit, and after 6 months it got me no where. When I changed my goal to $10,000/month profit, it seemed like an impossible goal at the time, but it got me super excited. That’s when things really started happening in my business.

Just a week or two after I set the $10k goal I discovered Googlecash, and ppc affiliate marketing. The rest was history.

Once you have a big goal you need to clearly visualize what that goal is: quit your job, world travel/mobile income, get out of debt/financial independence, lease a Ferrari Enzo, or whatever. Write your dream on a piece of paper, put a picture of your dream on the fridge & think about it all the time.

Try to imagine your goal as vividly in your mind as you can. Imagine how you will feel walking out of your job, the very last day. The look on your bosses face when you hand him your resignation letter, and tell him “I can’t afford to work for you anymore.”

The last day at my job was a day I will never forget, June 15, 2006, one of the greatest days of my life, I had officially entered the land of the living! Because life begins when you’re free from your day job!

The more you think about and visualize your goal or vision the more it becomes a burning desire. A burning desire is something that keeps you up at night, so excited that you’re tossing and turning and can barely sleep.

When you want to succeed in this business so badly that you can barely sleep at night, then you’ll figure out a way to make it work and join that top 2%.

When I started this business I didn’t get much sleep, and yes, I did toss and turn almost every night. Just ask my wife!

To the degree you can visualize and feel your goal as already accomplished, the faster you will attract it to you.

This is NOT motivational fluff, this is exactly what I did to get where I am. If you’ve read “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill you know what I’m talking about.

Here’s your homework assignment: Write down EXACTLY what you want out of this business and write down a specific deadline. Make sure it’s a BIG goal, something that really stretches you. Really think about it and then put it up on the wall where you can see it everyday.

If you want quit your job, write down why you want to quit your job, what you’ll do with the extra 8-10 hours a day, and when you’ll quit your job. Write a resignation letter to your boss and put it on your fridge until that special day comes.

In the next 2 posts I’ll talk about 2 more principles that separate the 2% of super affiliates form the 98%, and specific steps you can take to help you get into that elusive top 2%.

I remember the days of driving 30-45 minutes one way on I-90 in Boston to a job that I hated. In fact I hated it so much that I actually spend half my time surfing the web and the other half the time working on my Adwords campaigns.

And I quit before they could fire me!

I know some people actually enjoy their day jobs, and if you’re in that small minority, then congratulations.

But honestly I can’t understand how someone can go to work to a job that they hate 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year (48 if you have 4 weeks of vacation time!), day after day, month after month, and YEAR after YEAR for 45 YEARS!

Is it any wonder that so many people drink excessively, smoke, watch 4 hours of television a day??

My life is so radically different now, so much better now, as a super affiliate, it’s hard to describe.

I honestly never thought life, at least my life, could be this AWESOME!

I’m not saying this to brag.

I want all of you affiliates out there that are struggling to make money, working full time, and trying to find time to spend with your family as well, to know that success in this business-if you build it right and build solid affiliate campaigns-is SO WORTH IT.

Here’s some things I really love about the affiliate lifestyle:

# 5 SHOCKING BANK TELLERS:

I love when I go to the bank and the bank teller, looks at me, half shaven, wearing a free T-shirt I scored at the Affiliate Summit, and flip flops, and then looks at my bank account!

Shock and Awe! LOL

My wife and I went to the bank the other day and the teller told us we have too much money in our saving account, and recommended that we transfer the money into a CD where we could get a higher interest rate.

I told the teller that I would think about it. Honestly I DON’T CARE! In the time it takes me to actually set a CD with the bank, I could start an affiliate promotion that will make me 10X whatever interest I would make off a stupid CD.

#4 NAP TIME

What can I say, I’m a lazy affiliate. On a hot summer’s day at around 2:00pm I love turning on the ceiling fan and taking a nice nap on the sofa.

When I was in kindergarten I hated taking afternoon naps, now I love it!

#3 REAL SECURITY

A lot of job people talk about having ‘job security’ as their excuse for not starting a business. “Because you never know, the business may not work, it may go under, blah, blah, blah.”

If you think you have ‘job security’ in this day and age, you are living in a dream world!

Real security is:

1. Having the ability to launch an affiliate offer tomorrow that will cover all your living expenses.
2. Having so much money in the bank you could literally live on it for YEARS. This is a GREAT feeling!

#2 WORLD TRAVEL/MOBILE INCOME

My wife and I love to travel, and it’s great traveling when you’ve got money, because then you can go first class all the way!

We’re going to Bermuda next month for 5 action packed days that include

1. snorkeling
2. parasailing
3. sailing
4. helmet diving
5. swimming with dolphins
6. snorkeling over a shipwreck/glass bottom boat ride
7. horseback riding
8. Bermuda Aquarium, Natural History & Zoo
9. private tour of the island
10. botanical garden
11. perfumarie
12. Fort Hamilton

While we’re in Bermuda, we’ll be staying at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess, the top hotel on the entire Island. The Amex Centurion Travel Counselor, that I get with my black card, cut us a nice deal: instead of $520/night, we’re only paying $450/night!

Oh, by the way, 4 days after we get back from Bermuda we’re off to a 10 day Alaskan Cruise, that includes multiple helicopter trips over glaciers and snow capped maintains, a dog sled ride over glaciers, and a bunch of other activities.

We have a suite on the Alaskan cruise with Celebrity Cruises, with a butler!

YES, a butler!

The Alaskan Cruise goes from Anchorage to Vancouver. Once we arrive in Vancouver, we’re spending two days there, and then taking a float plane over to Victoria where we’re spending a day with friends.

And that’s JUST August. We have other excursions planned for October, November, and December (we’re going to India in December).

Let’s not forget, you can do affiliate marketing from anywhere around the world. You can actually LIVE in different parts of the world and run your business.

How about spending a month on a Greek Island in the Mediterranean for 2 months?

Fields Marshall is an American who moved to Pucon, Chile where he lives on a resort spending his days whitewater rafting and working on his affiliate business.

He right now makes a modest income as an affiliate, but lives like a king in Chile since the cost of living is lower than the US.

You don’t need to make $30k/month as an affiliate to live your dream life. If you’re making a modest income right now as an affiliate you can still live your dream life, Fields is a great example of this!

#1 LIVING THE LIFE YOU CHOOSE

I love being able to work my affiliate business around my lifestyle and not the other way around.

Recently my wife and I have decided to play squash every morning (well at least 5 days a week) at the local gym before we do anything else. Not only is it a lot of fun, but it really gets your energy levels up for the whole day.

So far I’ve beat my wife at every game we’ve played, but she’s getting way better everyday. She going to beat me soon!

Here’s what cool: Being able to go the gym at 9:00am in the morning while the rest of the world is busy at work.

My wife and I like making a schedule of all the fun things we want to do in a given day, and I work in my 2-4 hours of productive time in between all of that. Let me give you an example…

On Monday my wife and I played several games of squash in the morning and did some weight training, we then went to see the new Harry Potter film in the afternoon, and had a nice dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the evening.

Between our morning trip to the gym (squash/weight training) I squeezed in two hours of productive work. Then after Harry Potter and dinner, I did another hour of work and caught up on email and wrote a blog post.

Don’t let your work dictate your lifestyle, let your lifestyle dictate your work.

Now I know some of you are thinking, “There’s no way would get anything done on a schedule like your’s Amit.”

Wrong!

If you actually set deadlines for yourself and focus your time on income producing activities, that is, stuff that directly impacts your income, such as adding keywords to your ppc campaigns, then you’ll be amazed at how much you actually get done.

It’s possible to get more productive stuff accomplished with 2 hours of focused concentrated effort then 8 hours of fumbling around trying to do 10 things at once: checking email, working on your campaigns, while your chatting with a friend on Googletalk, and on the phone with your affiliate manager.

And you KNOW what I’m talking about!

So if you’re not living the affiliate lifestyle yet, WHAT are you waiting for!

I just read a great article today by Andrew Wee, about how Super Affiliate Kieron Donoghue offered free pens (yes PENS) to get subscibers and backlinks to his bingo affiliate site!

Keiron’s site took off after he started his pen promotion.

There’s a lot of talk about how if you want to become a super affiliate, you have to be “creative” and think “outside of the box.” Such as Keiron’s free pen offer.

Now I know a lot of affiliates are thinking: “How exactly do I do think outside of the box?!? I’m just trying to make a profit here!”

Here’s some tips on how affiliates can get their creative juices flowing:

1. Before you run out and try coming up with the next big creative idea that will launch you into super affiliate stardom, master the basics FIRST. If you’re doing ppc affiliate marketing like myself, learn as much as you can about it, and take consistent action until you understand how to use Google Adwords inside and out, push CPA offers etc. Only once you’ve mastered the basics will you start coming up with “outside of the box” ideas and techniques that will really skyrocket your affiliate efforts.
2. Form a Mastermind with other affiliates. Masterminds are some of the best ways to brainstorm new ideas. I’m a part of a mastermind group of about 10 super affiliates, we have 1 hour calls twice a month. The insights I get from these twice a month calls are absolutely priceless.
3. Have time away from your business. Believe it or not, setting time (at least several hours) away from your business everyday is one of the best ways to get your creative juices flowing. It’s weird, but when you’re totally not thinking about your business is when you get your best ideas. Your subconscious mind is ALWAYS at work!

I have a lot of out of the box affiliate strategies and techniques that I’ve never posted about on this blog, these strategies are quietly making me millions!

When you come up with a different angle for doing affiliate marketing (it doesn’t have to be earth shattering either, it could be something small), you immediately give yourself a competitive advantage over 99% of all the other affiliates out there.

But keep in mind it took me over a year before I really started to develop creative approaches to my affiliate marketing business. So if you’re just starting out, just focus on learning the basics.

When you get your creative juices flowing this game suddenly becomes really easy, and a LOT MORE FUN!

Now I know you’re thinking “Oh NO! Not more Google Slaps!?!”

We’ll I can guarantee you that they’re going to keep coming. And if you’re not prepared they could really knock the wind out of your affiliate ppc campaigns-leaving you on the ground gasping for air.

I say, bring on the Google Slaps, I’m READY! And I’ll tell you how you can be ready too.

Right now the Google quality score, that determine your minimum bids looks at the following factors:

1. How targeted your ad is to your keywords
2. The “quality” of your landing page (including bounce rates)

Now be ready because future Google slaps are going to make life harder and harder for a lot of affiliates. Here’s what you can expect:

1. A much stricter, tougher landing page quality score evaluation. Google is going to keep raising the bar. Before long they’ll be taking into consideration pagerank, how often fresh content is added to your landing page, how old your domain name is, and every other factor that’s considered for SEO.
2. Stricter requirement on how targeted your keywords is to your Google ad, your already seeing this is more competitive niches.

Now I know a lot of you have found loopholes to get around Google’s quality score. For example, changing your URL every time you get slapped. That may work for a while be eventually Big-G will catch on!

So what am I doing to keep Big-G happy and my minimum bids nice and low? Here’s what I do in a nutshell:

1. Make uber-tightly targeted ad groups, put the keyword in the ad at least once. You should be doing this one anyway, right? If you’re not doing this, start doing it right away, it will lower your minimum bid. And NO, dynamic keyword insertion will NOT help your quality score, and will NOT lower your minimum bid.
2. Build an SEO site with pages targeted towards PPC. In other words do both SEO and PPC at the same time. I had a chance to speak with top super affiliate Jeremy Palmer today, and he’s now using the same strategy.

So the real question in my mind was why is Google doing this? Is this a conspiracy to take out affiliates so Google can take over their space and cash in themselves?

No, actually that’s not the case AT ALL!

Step back for a moment and envision a quality score free world, a world where as long at your CTR is above 0.5% your ads would run. A world where you can bid 0.01 and your ads would run. Sound like a dream world? A world of limitless profits?

Actually, NO AGAIN!

Here what would happen as competition increases in this zero quality score Google slap free world: more and more advertisers (read - flood of affiliates with ugly one page landing pages they throw together with frontpage) flood every possible niche and market out there, as a result the bid prices will go higher, and higher, and HIGHER.

Eventually, the bid prices will get so high that most advertiser will be squeaking by with a tiny ROI, or breaking even just acquiring a customer (NOT good for affiliates doing CPA). And forget the people still bidding 0.05, they’re on page 12.

So here’s what Google’s goal is by introducing a more and more stringent quality score: they want to keep raising the bar on the quality to make sure the user experience is high AND make sure their advertisers are always making a nice profit.

I want you to really think about this, as Google raises the bar for any given niche/keyword, more advertiser will have their ads bumped. This way Google can assure that bid prices stay low enough so that the advertiser that don’t get bumped are making good profits.

A smaller supply of advertisers means lower bid prices and more profits for advertisers that survive the Google slaps. Profitable advertiser are happy advertisers that will continue to give millions of dollars to Google!

I don’t know about you but I’m super excited about this! If you’re willing to comply with Google quality score rules, you’re just going to keep making more and more money!

And you know what, most affiliate won’t comply with Google, that’s more profit for me and YOU if you take my advise!

I was recently tagged by Jeremy Palmer! :). Jeremy has an awesome ebook about affiliate marketing, check it out (NOT an affiliate link) if you’ve never read it. Now I’m usually not into tagging, but I’m doing this one since :

1. it’s an easy one (that’s the biggest reason), what can I say, I’m a lazy affiliate!
2. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Jeremy
3. I have some important stuff to share that will benefits affiliates and internet marketers in general

So what’s one thing did I learn at the affiliate summit?

I learned that there’s as many ways to do affiliate marketing as there are to painting a picture. I’ll be the first to tell you that some ways of doing this business are much more effective, stable, and long term than others, but I’m not getting into that debate again.

Whether you’re doing seasonal ppc promotions, build custom affiliate sites around long term affiliate promotions (like I do), blogging, build viral sites that get high traffic like Zac Johnson, do email marketing, or even submit articles with your affiliate link embedded in them, the key is to get REALLY good at that method of affiliate marketing before you do ANYTHING ELSE.

There are lots of affiliates out there-and you know who you are-that leapfrog from ppc affiliate marketing one day, pre-fab adsense sites the next day, and email marketing the day after.

It’s NUTS!

These leapfrogger are scratching their heads after 3 years of busting their butts, wondering why they’re barely making any money online.

Focus on one method of affiliate marketing and become an expert at it. What do I mean by ‘expert’? Well you should be making, at the very least, enough money to do affiliate marketing full time.

I don’t know how to make viral sites, do SEO, build a list, or any of that. But I do know how to do ppc affiliate marketing, and I know how to do it really well. Not only that, I’m constantly working on improving my skills so I can become even better at ppc affiliate marketing.

Develop a competitive advantage for your business, in internet marketing that usually means becoming an expert at something. When you’re starting out it may take you 6 months to find something that really drives you (it took me 6 months).

Once you find the way of making money that really clicks with you, stick with it until you’re so good at it that you’re qualified to give a talk about it at a conference.

You know one of the biggest reasons that so many affiliates are struggling is because what I call clone thinking. That is they do affiliate marketing like they’re following some cookbook recipe.

In particular when it comes to keyword research, they’ll go into a market like dog training. They’ll start by brain storming some possibilities :

dog training

train dog

dog behavior

dog obedience

and maybe a few more

They most likely got these right from the sales letter of the dog training ebook. Then they’ll put these into a keyword tool like wordtracker, and finally throw the results into separate adgroups. After running the campaigns for a few days they’ll discover that the keywords are too expensive and bid them down to the second page.

After optimizing the campaign for 3 months, they’ll think : “Damn! What am I doing wrong, I making 5 sales a day, with 50% ROI. How are these super affiliates making 50 sales a day with 100% ROI?!?”

Well here’s a tip, if you follow the same cookbook recipe to keyword research as everyone else then you’re going to face fierce competition and low profit margins (if any at all).

If you want to be a super affiliate you have to think outside of the box, especially when it comes to keyword research.

Here’s how I would tackle this market:

Dog Breeds
airedale terrier
akita
australian shepherd
basset hound
beagle
bichon frise
bloodhound
boston terrier
boxer
brittany
bulldog
bullmastiff
cairn terrier
cavalier king charles spaniel
chesapeake bay retriever
chihuahua
chinese shar-pei
cocker spaniel
collie
dachshund
doberman pinscher
english springer spaniel
german shepherd
german shorthaired pointer
golden retriever
great dane
great pyrenees
labrador retriever
lhasa apso
maltese
mastiff
minature pinscher
miniature schnauzer
newfoundland
papillons
pekingese
pembroke welsh corgi
pitbull
pomeranian
poodle
pugs
rottweiler
saint bernard
scottish terrier
shetland sheepdog
shih tzu
siberian husky
vizsla
weimaraner
west highland white terrier
yorkshire terrier

Dog Problems
aggression
anger
bark
barking
biting
chewing
crying
digging
flatulence
house break
house breaking
house training
jealousy
jumping
litterbox train
litterbox training
nipping
paper training
potty train
potty training
seperation anxiety
toliet train
toliet training
whining
chasing
begging
leash pulling
leash training
growling

Now the first row is a large list of dog types, including synonyms, such as canine, k9, and of course puppy. The second row is a huge list of all possible dog behaviors.

Multiple the first column by the second column and you have a highly targeted keyword list with broad reach. This is how a super affiliate would approach this market.

This is how a super affiliate makes 50 sales a day and 100% ROI. That is, by not just bidding on more keywords, but a much broader reach of keywords.

By the way all of this is from my presentation at the Affiliate Summit in Miami.

Paul, an affiliate, who saw my presentation at the Affiliate Summit, emailed me the following question:

“I enjoyed your presentation at Affiliate Summit. I have one quick question for you…

When you showed your example of building keyword lists using “dog” and “behavior”, what tool did you use to generate the list of various dog breeds? I tried to replicate your example in the Adwords keyword tool but that didn’t seem to return that same list. Ditto on the keyword “behavior”. Can you help?

Thanks!”

This is a really great question. Here’s what I wrote back to Paul:

“I’m glad you enjoyed my talk.

I would just google search dog breads and find some websites that discuss the different types of breeds. You can do something similar to get all the behavior + use lateral search tools, similar to the one wordtracker offers.

The key is to think outside of the box, don’t strictly rely on keyword research tools.”

Here’s what Paul wrote back:

“OK thanks Amit. From your slide it had the “look” of a keyword tool that had generated the list of breeds and a separate list of words related to “behavior.” I ran a search for dog breeds and wikipedia has a great entry, and searches on “types of behavior” came up with good results too. So from there I guess I would dump the lists into Excel and create the keyword combos. That’s pretty easy to do.

Thanks for the info Amit!”

Paul, you have got it down! I never would have though wikipedia would be a source to dig up keywords!

Kudos.

It’s this time of creative keyword research that separates the men from the boys, and the women from the girls!

I’m back in Chicago right now for the Perry Marshall’s Roundtable meeting. And I gotta tell you, I’m learning stuff that would totally blow your mind. I’ll tell you more about it in future posts (what’s not confidential anyway).

My friend and fellow blogger Andrew Wee has a great post based on an awesome thread of comments on my last Affiliate Summit post.

Andrew has some really great insight on how to crank out content sites that generate $1k/month-$2k/month. Andrew answers a burning question a lot of people have: How do you find good writers (especially overseas) that will write quality (ie sticky) content.

Here’s what Andrew has to say:

“The reality is that you will get what you pay for. Proven quality costs.

A workaround is to find new guys on sites like elance, workaholics or rent a coder, who’ve yet to establish themselves and might be willing to do quality work on the cheap in order to build some positive feedback.

If you’re going along this approach, you might like to farm out a batch of 3 articles, and solicit 10-20 freelancers to work on your project. You could then do a ’survivor’ style elimination and work with your favorite 2-3 writers.

The important thing to note is that you need to spend time scanning and headhunting quality. You might be really lucky and have a talented freelancer fall into your lap, but it’s not likely to happen.”

And that’s great advice!

Finding good people, whether it’s a content writer, programmer, graphics designer, is a matter of going through the numbers. I’m personally willing to pay more for quality content, however, they’re lots of excellent writers out there that will crank out great content for you for $5 an article. You just need the patience and perseverance to find them.

However, there’s one really powerful shortcut, it’s called crowdsourcing. You can do this on sitepoint.com.

What sitepoint.com allows you to do is setup a contest for anything web design/graphic design related. You set a cash prize for the contest, and let talented web designers from around the world submit their entries.

You pick the best entry and only pay that person!

The superaffiliatemindset.com logo was done through sitepointe.com, it only cost me $200. And my company found a very talented logo designer!

They REALLY should have crowdsourcing for writers.

If you answer yes to the follow questions, then chances are you’re an affiliate day trader:

1. Do you spend 6-12 hours a day monitoring your Adwords campaigns?
2. Are your affiliate promotions running on slim margins (10%-50% ROI), requiring that you have to keep a tight watch on your campaigns constantly?
3. Are you unable to take a day off from watching your campaigns without breaking into a cold sweet that you may be losing money?
4. Are you constantly checking your stats?
5. Are you feeling overwhelmed because you’re managing 100s of affiliate promotions at once?

Now if several of the questions above really struck a nerve with you, then you’re a day trader, not trading stocks, but trading affiliate promotions. Now all I can tell you is that you don’t just have a JOB, you have a BAD JOB!

A lot of affiliates get burned out by this approach, it’s not what they expected. They thought that by being free from a job they were going to have a dream life and do all the things they wanted to do. However, they just end up having another job!

This is exactly what happened to me when I first quit my job! I had a lot more “free” time, but somehow my productivity went down and my income stagnated.

If you want to work less and make more as an affiliate, and have lifestyle (=money+TIME), then here’s what I suggest:

1. STOP Checking Stats More than Once a Day - Constantly check stats will not only give you a potential nervous breakdown, but it kills your productivity. Check your stats once a day for campaigns your actively working on, and once every few days for campaigns that are running on autopilot. This will be tough at first, but trust me, you’ll be a LOT more happier and productive
2. Focus on a Few Large Affiliate Offers - Find affiliate offers where the top affiliates makes more than $100k a month (ask your affiliate manager about this). Build up a few of these offers. Hire a programmer and writing company to make a custom affiliate site for you, with keyword targeted ppc landing pages. A few large campaigns are easier to manager (and have more potential for long term profits) then 100s of smaller campaigns
3. Bid Low and Shot for High Profit Margins - A lot of affiliate bid high enough on an affiliate offer to “maximize profit.” I prefer to bid low and make around 100% ROI on an affiliate offer, EVEN if i make LESS total profit. Do you know why? Because it’s less maintenance; I can let it run on virtual auto-pilot since my margins are so high it will make a profit even during slow periods. That frees up my time to work on other affiliate offers and REALLY maximized my profit if you know what I’m saying.
4. Block 2 Hours Out of Each Day for Productive Tasks - This one is a bomb shell. Make a list every night of THE most important tasks (for your business) that must be done the next day. Now as far as I’m concerned the most important task, or productive tasks are tasks that DIRECTLY IMPACT YOUR INCOME. Such as launching a campaign, adding keywords, writing and testing new ad copy, etc, etc. Now the next day shut off your cell phone, skype, IM, googletalk, don’t check your email (etc…), just spend two hours straight working on productive tasks. If you do this, your productivity and income will SKYROCKET, but I’m warning you, this takes discipline.

We’ve all been brainwashed into believing we have to work 9am-5pm for 5 days a week, even if we’re self-employed. If you can get more done working 10 hours a week/2 hours a day, than working 9-5, which would you rather choose?

Day 2

On day 2 I had a chance to see Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney), and Lee Dod’s presentation on Monetizing Communities. This talk was basically about how to develop viral sites (forum/membership sites in particular) that slowly overtime build up a solid membership base all from free search engine traffic.

These sites are monetized with well chosen and well placed contextual advertising.

It was a fascinating talk. In fact, I been talking to Tom (my business partner) about purchasing sites like these. A well monetized site that has a large active membership base can be a solid residual source of revenue for years to come.

After the talk, I had a chance to take a picture with Shoemoney…

Shoemoney is really a very nice guy, always willing to help people.

The next blockbuster talk was by Kris Jones, CEO of Pepperjam, on the “Confluence of Search and Affiliate Marketing.” What an AWESOME talk! He talked about the power of search arbitrage, and gave an excellent outline on how a newbie affiliate can get started in the world of search arbitrage.

As you know search arbitrage, or ppc affiliate marketing, is my specialty! So I was very excited to hear the CEO of Pepperjam talking highly of this method of affiliate marketing.

LESSONS LEARNED

At dinner that night I had a chance to speak with some other very successful super affiliates. I talked to one guy who was running 500 affiliate offers at one time, making $20-$50/day from each one. WOW!

Not only this, Kris Jones had mentioned during his talk that he became a super affiliate by promoting 2000 affiliate programs, generating $50/month profit for each! Amazing.

This approach to affiliate marketing is definitely contrary to everything I’ve been teaching. That is, you should focus on a few big affiliate offers and build several authority sites and work towards generating a $100k+/month per affiliate offer.

That’s what’s cool about affiliate marketing, there’s so many creative ways to make it work!

Nevertheless, I will continue to advocate building a handful of affiliate sites instead of 1000s. Here why:

1. Long Term Profits - once you build an established large affiliate site, it more likely to make long term profits than a small campaign making $50/day profit
2. Google’s landing page “quality” score - Since paid search and natural search are converging, small mini sites won’t last long term-especially on Google
3. Competitive advantage - having just a few big affiliate sites gives you the ability to continually improve your sites, split test your landing pages to improve conversions, revamp the site design every six months, etc, etc. With 1000s of sites this could be a near impossible task, certainly impossible for most affiliates. With rising ppc costs, continually improving site conversions is a necessity!
4. Low maintenance - Once you have a large site optimized, maintaining it is easy, especially compared to monitoring the performance of 1000s of smaller affiliate sites
   

Would you rather try to keep 1000 plates spinning or just a couple?