If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Here’s a quick thought for you :

PPC affiliate marketing is an much art as it is a science .

I talk a lot about :

1. Optimizing your bids
2. Split testing ads
3. Split testing your landing page
4. Setting up your campaign properly
5. And tracking your metrics

This is the scientific, or analytical, aspect of affiliate marketing. And as a former scientist I, no doubt, really like this aspect of the business.

Now here’s what I’ve realized : you can be a quiz at the analytical left brain aspects of this business and still struggle to make it work!

Why?

Because there’s a right brain creative aspect of ppc affiliate marketing that’s just as important as the analytical one.

So what’s the creative right brain element to ppc affiliate marketing?

1. Understanding the USP (unique selling proposition) of the offer you’re promoting
2. Understanding what the emotional hot buttons are in your niche
3. Understanding consumer buying patterns in your niche
4. Writing your copy so it speaks the language of your demographic, whether they’re new moms, single male yuppies, or whatever. Do you even know what your target demographic is?
5. Overall, understanding the psychology of your niche and getting into the frame of mind of the customer

By really doing your homework before hand (5 point above) you’ll be able to write really effective Google ad copy (that will get a high CTR) and landing page copy (that will get a high conversion rate), and even do much more effective keyword research. Just doing this will often spell the difference between success and failure.

Have YOU been doing your homework before you promote a new affiliate offer, or are you like most affiliates who just jump in a niche and throw up a campaign as fast as they can hoping it will convert?

My wife and I had a chance to take a peak at the Boston Marathon today. The Marathon goes through Beacon St., 1 block down from where we live, at mile marker 23.

Funny thing, we actually had to cut across the Marathon runners to get to our acupuncture appointment!

Watching the Marathon runners got me thinking about one of the most important keys to affiliate success : persistence.

Running 26.4 miles is the epitome of persistence, training non stop for 6-12 months for a marathon is all about persistence.

My story of affiliate success is also all about persistence.

It took me about 10 months before I started making any significant money in affiliate marketing. I had officially started my affiliate business early in 2005, and it took me until Nov until I made any profit at all, and that month I ended up making around $3k profit.

In the first 6 months of building my business I didn’t make a SINGLE affiliate sale. Can you imagine how discouraging that is?

Once I learned about ppc affiliate marketing I got to work and launched a total of 15 failed campaigns, with nothing to show for it but one campaign that produced 3 sales a week before it fizzled out.

And you know what? I was a total newbie, I really didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t have a team helping me. I busted my butt setting up those 15 campaigns.

Some of you are crying because you launched 3 campaigns and they didn’t work out!

I’m here to tell you : SUCK IT UP!

No one is going to hand you success on a silver platter. If you want to make a 6 or 7-figure income in this business and have an incredible lifestyle, you’re going to have to pay the price. You’ve gotta toughen up, there’s no boss to tell you what to do anymore, YOU are responsible for YOUR success.

Biggest reasons most affiliates fail :

1. They quit too soon. How many affiliates would have kept on going after 9 months of no success? I can only imagine how many affiliates there are out there who have launched 10 campaigns, had no success, so they quit, when their 11th campaign would have been an enormous success.
2. They’re constantly jumping to something else. They try ppc for 2 months, doesn’t work, so they jump to SEO. They try SEO for 2 months, again doesn’t work out, so they jump to blogging. Etc, Etc, Etc… Ever met a leap frog affiliate like this? Here’s a tip : Try sticking to one thing long enough to actually get good at it!

Here’s a Secret…

It takes about 99% competence in ppc affiliate marketing before you hit it BIG. At 95% competence you’ll make a little bit of money but nothing significant. At 90% competence you’ll break even.

At anything less than 90% competence you’ll lose money.

Reaching the magical 99% mark takes some serious dedication and persistence.

How long will it take you?

It depends on how badly you want to succeed and how hard you’re willing to work.

So when you have a few failed campaigns, or even 15 failed campaigns as in my case, don’t tuck your tail in and hide under the bed like a scared little puppy. Stand UP and say “I’m going to WIN no matter WHAT IT TAKES!”

If you want to play ball with the heavy hitters you have to prove that you have what it takes first.

I’m a big fan of Robert Kiyosaki, I’ve read a number of his books and played the board games CashFlow 101 & CashFlow 102 - which I HIGHLY recommend (NOT affiliate links, just in case you’re wondering).

Before I struck it big and become financially independent, my wife and I played the CashFlow games literally dozens of times.

The goal of CashFlow is simple : to build a passive income from real estate deals and business investments that is 1X to 2X your living expenses, at that point you escape the “rat race” and move on to the “fast track” where you can build your business empire and do lots of cool stuff.

It’s an AMAZING game that will really take your thinking to the next level. I can tell you that it really help me back when I had a lot of broke job thinking.

If you’ve played the CashFlow game before you know that the basic strategy to follow is this:

1. Do Capital Gains deals, where you can make a whole bunch of money is a short period of time. Flipping real estate or trading stocks is how you do this in CashFlow.
2. CashFlow Deals : Once you’ve accumulated some serious cash (I’ll usually shot for about $50k), then I start investing in CashFlow Deals. This is long term stuff that will give you a steady amount of passive income every month. Remember building your passive income is ultimately the goal. You do this by buying businesses and apartment building with the money you’ve made with the capital gains deals.

Here’s what I’m getting at…

I want you to sit back and think about this for a moment, and how this applies to affiliate marketing?

Here’s a smart long term strategy for financial freedom with affiliate marketing :

Capital Gains Deals : Start a bunch of direct linking campaigns and cash in while they’re hot. Hit up season affiliate offers, and new hot CPA offers. You can quickly make a ton of cash using these strategies. (I know from a tax/legal stand point this is NOT actually capital gains income, I’m just making an ANALOGY)

Cashflow Deals : From the money you make with direct linking and short term affiliate offers you can invest that money into : building authority sites, buying existing websites, developing your own product, etc, etc.

If you ask me this is one of the TOP ways of becoming financially free. WAY faster & easier than the traditional route of messing around with real estate and traditional business.

Yuck!

Here’s the problem with how most affiliates do this business…

Most affiliates usually focus strictly on short term offers (capital gains) and have to keep promoting more and more stuff. Ever hear about the super affiliate bragging about making 100 sites before Christmas season starts?

Dude, that’s a BAD job if you ask me - but you will make a lot of money.

The other scenario (much smaller percentage) is the affiliate who tries to make a authority site or who tries to produce their own product right off the bad (not really an affiliate in that case). There’s no doubt this scenario works, however, it will typically take you MUCH longer to get financially free.

It’s also a bigger risk since :

1. Your investing a lot of money out of your job income into something that could be a big FLOP. You don’t want to get financially screwed.
2. You don’t have the real world experience of launching campaign after campaign and getting your butt kicked by Google as few times. The experience of being an affiliate FIRST gives you a HUGE advantage when you’re moving on to bigger more long term projects.

So in a nutshell :

1. If you’re not already, start bringing in some big money with short term affiliate offers
2. After you’ve got some cash, start building a SOLID income stream. Trust me, once you have steady income stream your stress levels will go way down and you’ll be MUCH happier - especially if that income stream is several times your living expenses.

Affiliate marketing & being a super affiliate is not just a business, it’s a way of life!

It’s hard to describe how radically my life has changed in the last few years. I literally went from being dirt broke, my wife and I lived in a 300 sq ft 1 bedroom apartment, and I barely had enough money to put food on the table.

Today we’re millionaires, living a life that I could not even dream of a few years ago. It’s all thanks to affiliate marketing!
Here’s what the super affiliate lifestyle means to my wife and I : how we live, how we give, and what we have become…

How We Live

The Super Affiliate Lifestyle is NOT just about making lots of money, it’s about having time AND money. You can have have millions in the bank but if you don’t have time to enjoy it, what’s the point?

Here’s what it’s all about :

A Night on the Town: Dropping $1200 going out to a Broadway show and a swanky French restaurant, Aujourd’hui. We spend $1000 on two tickets to see Wicked, and $200 at Aujourd’hui, quite possibly the top restaurant in Boston.

Flying First Class & Traveling the World : Once you start flying first class you can’t go back to coach. It’s not just a bigger seat, they actually serve you food (a rarity these days), you get a separate line for check in and security, and of course you get access to the executive lounge.

My wife and I are flying first class in Lufthansa going to India this December, that should be a treat! The going rate for these tickets is close to $8k per person.

The trip to India will be the last in a whole series of trips I’ve taken and will take this year: Miami, Austin (twice), Houston (twice to see in laws), NJ (twice to see parents), NYC, Bermuda, Alaska, Victoria (CA), Vancouver (CA), Chicago (twice) & Alaska.

Next year we plan to go to: Turkey, Paris (France), and a bunch of other places I’ll tell you about in future blog posts.

We plan to travel way more once Shilpi finishes school.

To travel you really need both time and money, which this business gives!

Designer Clothing from Nordstrom : If you’ve never shopped at Nordstrom before it’s an experience! The customer service is second to none! So you can image that my wife and I were super excited when they finally opened a Nordstrom here in Massachusetts.

Within two weeks we dropped about $1600 on new clothes. Now you have to understand that this was a big stretch for both of us. We grew up in modest middle class homes, where we bought our clothes at blue light specials at Kmart.

I’m not kidding.

At Nordstorm my wife was eying a beautiful designer coat. She was reluctant to get it, the price tag was $750. I told Shilpi, you can get anything you want. I encouraged her to get the coat, and WOW does it look great on her.

It’s the MOST expensive article of clothing she’s ever had in her life.

I bought a number of items myself, including two designer corduroy pants that I spend $350 on! Nordstrom actually tailor fitted the length of the pants for free. One of the corduroy pants were Santarelli’s, made in Italy.

Growing up I thought that designer clothing was overrated, but I have to tell you, you haven’t lived life until you’ve worn one of these Italian made corduroy pants!

WAKING UP AT 10:00am : I used to wake up at 6:00am back when I was a wage slave (working a job). There are few things I hated more than having my deepest soundest sleep shattered by an alarm clock at 6:00AM IN THE MORNING.

I hate alarm clocks.

People were not meant to wake up to alarm clocks, you’re supposed to wake up naturally when your body is fully rested.

And that’s exactly what I do now.

By 9:30-10:00am I’m fully rested, NOT any earlier!

So if you want to permanently smash your alarm clock, get busy on your campaigns, the longer you dilly dally the more you’re missing out on life and sleep! LOL

NOT HAVING TO SACRIFICE THE MOST VALUABLE DAYS AND YEARS OF YOUR LIFE TO JOB :

If you’re working a job right now, and it’s not your dream job and you’re not 100% satisfied with it, then everyday you go to that job, your giving up the most precious asset that you have in this world:

Your time.

Do you really want to wait until your 65 to retire? Are you excited about working a job in your 20’s and 30’s, the most productive years of your life??

Forget about the millions you can make with affiliate marketing, make your goal just buying your life back from the 9 to 5 rat race.

If you can make double your income on your part time doing affiliate marketing, then you can wake away from your day job. Make this YOUR #1 GOAL.

The last day on my job was July 15, 2006, I’ll never forget that day as long as I live. It was one of the greatest days of my life.

So stop being a wage slave.

Your life has not really begun yet until you quit your day job and joined the ranks of the financially free!

Next time I’ll talk about: How We Give

How Amit, Tom and I Got Together…

In one of Amit’s posts, he mentioned that one of the keys to working less and making more money as a super affiliate was to build a winning affiliate team. So how did it all began for us?

Tom was Amit’s client, and Amit was mine To be more precise, by the time I got into the picture, Tom and Amit were already more of a ‘team’.

When I first worked with Amit I knew instantly he was different. He had a list of content needs, the style he wanted me to adopt, what the content was for, etc. Now I work with many clients and it really pains me to see them go about like headless chickens sometimes, asking for this one day, this the next, and then this… just because of what they read yesterday, or an ebook they bought and read last night, or a special free report on this super secret new thing, etc., etc. By Friday, the client is into such a fit that he just gets more and more confused on what he wants! Everything is half-way. Nothing is really successful.

Amit was different. He knew what he wanted and how to achieve it. I met Tom on the same project and immediately liked his professionalism and the sincerity that came across even if we only corresponded via email and had our weekly telecons.

Just like what he did with Tom Amit lost NO time in offering me a percentage of his profits in return for continually working with him and prioritizing his projects. And I reacted exactly like Tom (LOL), I was hesitant due to my bursting schedule. To cut the long story short, I accepted but asked for a month or two to fix my schedule.

So why did I accept? Was it the lure of great moolah? First, it’s B.S. to say that making great money online is not great because you know what? IT IS. However, to make it with people you LIKE and most of all RESPECT, that’s something that just doesn’t come across everyday folks.

As a netpreneur, your instinct may be to “keep it all under tabs”. It’s YOUR ideas, YOUR strategies, and therefore YOUR profits. So much so that you don’t want others ‘dipping their hands into your bowl’. Well, as Amit has been trying to teach you – by example – you will achieve WAY MORE than you are currently earning if you let go a little bit. You cannot be the CEO and the janitor you know. One will suffer and you better pray it’s not the CEO part!

 … and My Take on the Super Affiliate Lifestyle

For those of you who are not successful yet with affiliate marketing, you may be asking “Is all this true?”, “Is it possible indeed to achieve financial freedom from  affiliate marketing?” I can only share my experience.

Each check is a great experience but one thing sticks out to me.

I was in Spain. I was sitting in a café overlooking the great, blue sea… my husband sitting just across me. We just came from an internet café where we checked out the stats of one of Amit’s affiliate sites and of which I am a partner. That was the time it REALLY donned on me…

I’m on vacation. I have not turned on my laptop in over a week. And I am STILL earning this much. I thought, as I sit here sipping this coffee, enjoying the sun on my face, I am earning and earning well.

Damn! I love affiliate marketing!