This is an idea I’ve touched on in the past, and in this post I really want to hit on how to build momentum and why it’s SOOO important.

I want you to think of your affiliate marketing business as a big boulder. Now your goal is to become a super affiliate.

How do you hit that goal?

You have to push the boulder over a hill and super affiliate success and riches are waiting for you at the bottom of the other side of the hill.

Now it’s going to take A LOT of energy and effort in the beginning when you’re trying to get that boulder up to the top of the that hill.

But once you get the boulder to the top of the hill the rest is easy, because now all you have to do is push your boulder DOWNHILL. As you push it downhill it will gain more and more speed until you don’t have to push it at all!

At which point you’re a super affiliate with a massive income on virtual autopilot.

Unfortunately most affiliates do not apply enough energy to even move the boulder, let alone get it to the top of the mountain. The affiliates that do successfully move the boulder often times decide to call it quits just before they reach the top of the hill!

If only they had applied just a little bit more energy in pushing the boulder!

Here’s how you apply enough energy to your boulder so that it hits the top of the hill:

1. Launch at least 5-8 campaigns a month consistently and LEARN from the ones that fail as well as the ones that succeed. This is SO critical when you’re in the momentum building phase. The more campaigns you launch a month the more energy you’re applying to the boulder. If you’re only launch one campaign a month and spend all your time time try to make it work, then you’re NOT applying enough energy to even move the boulder.
2. Stay consistent, don’t launch 8 campaigns one month and zero the next. If you do this your boulder will start moving backwards!

Now once you get your boulder to the top of the mountain the rest is just a matter of adding fuel to the fire by scaling & building up the profitable campaigns you’ve found. This is the FUN part!

Are You applying enough energy to the boulder so that it’s moving up the mountain, or are you just scratching your heads trying to figure out why the boulder isn’t moving?

I hear a lot of affiliates who have been in this business for sometime tell me all reasons, I mean the bs excuses, why they’re not a super affiliate yet:

1. I don’t have a PhD like you Amit!
2. I don’t have the money.
3. I just don’t have any time to work on my business.
4. I have kids!
5. You got in early, it’s too saturated now.
6. I don’t know the right people like you do.
7. Blah, blah, blah!

Yon can come up with a million reasons why you’re not a super affiliate yet, even though you been “doing” affiliate marketing for the last 3 years with little to show for it.

Let’s be honest, deep down you know all your excuses are complete bullshit!

Here are the REAL reasons you’re not a super affiliate yet:

1. You keep focusing on all reason why you can’t do this business. Make your bs excuses the reason WHY you need to succeed at this business. If you don’t have time or money, make that the reason why you NEED to become a super affiliate, and NOT the reason you can’t become one.
2. You’re thinking TOO small. You get an affiliate offer to $50/day profit and move on to something else, when the top affiliates may be making $1500/day profit with the same offer. STOP being happy with table scrapes and start working towards building your affiliate campaigns to 4-figure a day in sales. Your affiliate income will NEVER outgrow the level of your thinking. Kick it up a notch!
3. You’re scared shit of losing money. Get over it. Your investing in your future, NOT “losing money.” How much money did you “lose” going to college? How’s the ROI on that investment working for you?
4. You’re lazy. I had to work my ass off in the beginning to build my momentum and get my business off the ground. If you’re only testing one affiliate offer a month, you’re dead in the water, there’s no way you’re going to build momentum. I’ll talk more about this in the next post…
5. You’re not consistent. If you do this business for 4 months and then take a month or 2 off and then try to get back into it again, you’re again killing your momentum.
6. You don’t want it bad enough. Honestly this is the BIGGEST reason you’re not a super affiliate yet. You need to have a burning desire to succeed to become a super affiliate. You need to have a CRYSTAL CLEAR vision of what you want. Your attitude has to be like Micheal Phelps : eat, sleep, & launch affiliate campaigns. If you’re NOT having trouble sleeping at night because you’re so excited, then you don’t want it bad enough.

So if you’re sick and tired of just poking a stick at affiliate marketing then SUCK IT UP and take an honest look at why you’re not a super affiliate yet.

Google just recently announced that it’s getting rid of minimum bids on keywords!

No joke.

Of course there’s a catch, they’re going to replace minimum keyword bids with what they call “First Page Bids”, that is, the minimum amount you have to bid on a keyword to show up on the first page.

Now does that mean your ad will show up on page 2+ if your bid below the “First Page Bid”?!?

Honestly, we won’t know until they roll it out.

If that’s not enough, Google has also decide to calculate the quality score on the fly, every time a user searches for a keyword you’re bidding on.

WOW!

The quality score will also be dynamic, meaning that depending on where your ad is showing, which country, which search partner, which website, it will have a DIFFERENT Quality score.

Read it from right from horse’s mouth.

Implications for PPC Affiliates…

It’s hard to say anything at this point.

If the on fly Quality Score calculations also apply to landing page quality score, the results could be disastrous for affiliate who survive by changing their domain name and reuploading their campaign every time they get slapped.

On the other hand, a dynamic quality score could potentially deliver more traffic and reduce the impact of Google slaps.

Cross your fingers, we won’t know the true effect of this Quality Score “Improvement” until we’re hit with it.

I recently did an interview with my good friend and fellow blogger Andrew Wee, for his Friday podcast on WhoisAndrewWee.com.

Click Here to Liston to the Interview.

Enjoy the call, I get into some really great content in regards to the mindset you need to win at PPC.

Let’s face it, bidding on trademark terms-especially on major brand trademarks is BIG money for PPC affiliates. This includes trademarks for the offer you’re promoting and competitor trademark terms as well.

Trademark bidding may be highly profitable but it’s also equivalent to playing Russian roulette with your affiliate income, especially if a large majority of your sales are coming from trademarks!

Why?

Let me illustrate with 2 stories…

At Affiliate Summit Boston, I had dinner with Jeremy Palmer, John Hasson, and Ajay (all PPC super affiliates).

Anyway, Jeremy was telling me about an affiliate who made $2 million last year (no joke) all from bidding on ONE trademark term (plus misspelling and variations of course).

Well, the merchant suddenly decided to no longer allow trademark bidding for affiliates!

Now the guy who make $2 million last year is now LOOKING FOR A JOB!?! Apparently all of his income was coming from that one trademark term.

Scary, isn’t it?

There’s always competitor trademarks, right?

Wrong!

A friend of mine who was running a very profitable offer ($1k/day net profit) was forced to pause his campaign after the merchant threatened to freeze his account if he didn’t stop bidding on COMPETITOR trademarks.

Now, I’m not saying don’t bid on trademarks, I bid on trademarks all the time.

What I’m saying is don’t DEPEND on trademark bidding as your sole source, or majority of, your affiliate income.

Ask yourself : “How stable are my affiliate campaigns? Can they be wiped out by one policy change from the merchant?”

If the answer is YES, you’d better get busy!

I gotta tell you, it’s nuts down here in South Florida, people are stocking up and preparing for what could be a category 1 Hurricane, Hurricane Fay, hitting us hard. Shilpi and I are ready-well as ready as well ever be for our first hurricane.

Now how do you prepare when your affiliate sales get hit by a storm? What I mean by that is your affiliate sales take a major beating between Google slaps and market slowdowns.

I know for a fact a lot of affiliates are hurting right now. My affiliate sales have been particularly slow this time of the year. I’ve seen market slowdowns before but this is NUTS. Don’t feel bad for me, overall, my affiliate profits are doing very well, thanks to some new offers I launched earlier this year that are picking up the slack of the other offers I’m running.

Will the market rebound? Most certainly, however, my philosophy is to leave NOTHING to chance. When sales slow down I get busy.

Here’s an action plan :

1. First lower your bids on your existing campaign using advanced ad scheduling. The idea is to improve your profits and ROI while the market is down.
2. Start researching more keywords for your niche - I’ve found this to be one of the most effective ways to breathe life into an apparently dying campaign. Time and time again I’ve been able to recover lost search volume and sales doing this.
3. If your offers are all running on Google, start testing Yahoo and MSN, and vis versa. If you’re doing Google Search only, test Content Network as well, and vis-versa. Get busy testing more and more avenues of traffic generation.
4. Launch more offers. I know, this one’s a no brainer. It’s also a good idea to WAIT until the market begins to turn around (Sept, Oct, etc) before you launch a new affiliate offer. However, you can start setting everything up now and even upload your campaign paused into Google, ready to launch at the click of a button!

Recovering from an Affiliate Storm is actually not that hard, the hard part is keeping your emotions in check.

Don’t freak out! Remember if you’re seeing a seasonal downturn your sales WILL GO BACK UP, even if you do nothing.

Remember ultimately YOU are in control of your success and your future.

For those of you who didn’t have a chance to see me live, click here to see the slides to my talk.

For those of you who are wondering, YES there is a lot of overlap with the talk I did last year. I did add some new material and took out some old stuff. My goal is always to provide the most relevant and useful information, EVEN if it’s a little repetitive.

WOW! What a crazy several days in Boston. Shilpi and I flew in on Saturday morning to spend the weekend searching for luxury apartments in Back Bay. The first day was very discouraging, we couldn’t find anything good in the original price rage we had set.

We asked our agent to bump up the price range and after that point we saw some absolutely amazing places. We found one we absolutely love that’s right on Newbury St in Back Bay. This place will cost 4 times more than what we pay for our place in Brighton (which by the way we’re renting out), but it will totally be WORTH IT.

Not only is the location perfect, our new place will be over 1600 sq ft compared to our 700 sq ft condo in Brighton. Shilpi and I are moving right into our new place in Back Bay at the end of November, when we move back to Boston from Miami.

I also bought an iPhone while I was in Boston, and I gotta tell you, this is the COOLEST most advanced phone I’ve ever seen. It’s unreal what you can do with an iPhone, not including the TONS of cool apps that you can get for it.

As for the Affiliate Summit, I can’t really tell you much about it, I only attended the keynote-which was very good-and my own session where I talked about “Super Affiliate Strategies You Must Know.”

When I first started attending the Affiliate Summit I got lot out of the sessions, nowadays I barely attend any sessions. For me the best part about this conference and most conferences are the networking opportunities.

It was great seeing a lot of familiar faces and connecting with friends and colleagues:

Then on Monday evening I got a call from Shilpi who had flown back home Sunday night, she had a fever. So changed my flight and flew back one day earlier to take care of her.

As it turns out, I caught the same fever Shilpi had, I’m still recovering as I write this post!

I just saw a great interview that my good friend Anik Singal, founder of Affiliate Classroom, did with Dave Woodward from Legendary Marketers.

Anik has an AMAZING rags to riches story, check it out:

Anik also has also launched an awesome and very inspirational blog called IWillFight.com.

Anik and I have partnered up recently, we’re working on something REALLY BIG. So stay tuned!

Back when I was a “wet behind the ears” newbie I thought that all super affiliates had an incredible lifestyle. Then as I met more and more affiliates and learned more about the business I realized that NOT all super affiliates are living anything resembling the super affiliate style I often talk about.

Why is that?

There’s actually several reason:

#1 WORKAHOLIC

It’s great being passionate about your business, but some affiliates take it to the next level. They fill every waking hour of their time working on their affiliate business. They ALWAYS make sure to keep themselves EXTREMELY busy and stressed out.

You know the type of people I’m talking about.

Honestly, I’ve been guilty of this in the past.

Why do people fall into this trap? I think there’s 2 (and possibly more) underlying reason:

1. They’re trying to fill an emotional void by keeping themselves busy.
2. At a subconscious level, they feel guilty over working very little and making lots of money. So they work 14 hours a day to feel that they’ve “earned it”!

#2 FEAR

Ever had the fear that one day you’ll wake up and all your affiliate income will be gone? As irrational as it seems, this is what drives some super affiliates to overwork themselves. They feel if they don’t keep expanding their business, it will collapse like a house of cards.

Now, what if your business IS a “house of cards”?

#3 YOUR BUSINESS MODEL

I think this is the biggest reason many super affiliates have gotten themselves in a rut. Their entire business model is based on pumping out as many affiliate offers as they can to keep their income up, before the offers they launched several months to a year back dry up.

I call this the affiliate opportunity seeker, who’s always looking for a fast way to make a quick buck.

The problem with this strategy is that you’re like a hamster on a wheel, you have to keep going and going, and ultimately in the end you haven’t accomplished anything because you don’t have a real asset.

I’m focused on promoting 1 to 2 quality long term high volume affiliate offers per year, and building an entire site around the niche. We’ll invest a good 6 months into building up the ppc campaign, and have a team continue to build up the content and natural search engine traffic on the site on a weekly basis.

I’ll make money from these affiliate offers for years to come.

#4 POOR TIME MANAGEMENT

Without saying, if you’re poor at managing your time then you’ll end up working 14 hr a day just to get anything done.

Frittering away too much time checking email, “analyzing” your stats every 10 minutes, and complaining about how ‘the world isn’t fair’ on forums will KILL your productivity.

So stop being stupid and start focusing on completing income producing activities FIRST before you waste your time with non productive time killers.

So if you’re already free from your job and a super affiliate then START LIVING YOUR DREAM ALREADY!

Do you even remember why you started doing affiliate marketing in the first place?