ChrisDOT

Almost every year we see people around us set new years resolutions – a set of goals for themselves. It seems as the year goes on they get abandoned and forgotten about except for the small percentage that actually work hard for the full year and fulfill those goals.

So, why do we set goals and then give up on them? I guess it can be a number of things, but it comes down to – how bad do we want it? When we want something bad we’ll do everything we can to make sure we get it.

So what we can do to ensure we hit our goal?

Set mini realistic goals goals is a good start. Map our your main goal, then break it up by month, by week and even by day depending on what it is. Map out what you need to do and what target you need to achieve in that time period to hit your main goal. Make sure you stick with the mini-goals, if you don’t hit one of them, make sure you adjust the rest to compensate.

Write your goals down in a place you can see it every day. I use a whiteboard on my wall to keep track of all important information, my goals are on there, along with lots of other good stuff.

Give yourself rewards. Set rewards for each mini-goal you set and even one for your master goal. Often that slight motivation of something immediate will help with the master plan.

Publicly announce your goals. It’s no surprise that not many of us want to put ourselves out there for the world to see, now with announcing your goals to the world, you’re not only being held accountable to yourself but to everyone who has read them. Now long with your own self satisfaction for hitting your goals you will have the constant encouragement and push from others to help keep you motivated.

Hold yourself accountable. If you massively miss your goals, make sure there is some repercussion, make sure you work that much harder to hit the next one.

Best of luck for a prosperous 2010.

Just wanted to wish all my affiliate marketing friends (and fake friends as some call it) a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

2009 was a big year for me and several of the people around me. We completed several goals, now 2010 is upon us, we must now renew these goals and go harder to accomplish them. As always I need to thank everyone for their help and support along the way. I won’t name names, but everyone knows who they are. The worst thing in the world is naming names and forgetting someone!

Everyone, look back on the 2009 year. See what you did right, what you did wrong. Learn from it, grow from it. Let’s make 2010 the best year yet.

With being the co-owner of an affiliate training site, I get to see and work with several individuals – all with different backgrounds, experiences, training and knowledge. It’s no surprise that not everyone will become successful at Affiliate Marketing. It’s the nature of the beast, it’s like any business – it takes a certain mindset and dedication. I have noticed a trend of successful marketers that have not only come through our program but in general, they all share very similar attributes. I highly recommend anyone new to affiliate marketing or trying to break out in it to study these and try to adapt to them as much as possible.

Hard Working
I think this almost goes without saying, all the successful affiliates I have seen have a tremendous work ethic, they work hard and work often. The fatal mistake I see many people make is they treat this as a hobby and you just can’t do that. This is a business, you need to treat it like a business. It’s understandable that if you have a full time job that the time you have to dedicate to affiliate marketing might not be as much as you’d like, it’s very important for you to make the best of the time you spend, limit distractions and get down to business. Most of the time you don’t see these people talking on AIM, they are too busy working.

Clear Vision / Goals
Most people that excel at affiliate marketing have clear goals on what they have to achieve, they know where they want to be in a week, in a month, in a year, etc. They lay out what they want and then figure out how to get there, they don’t just fly blind in the dark, they make sure they have a clear path.

No Fear
They aren’t scared to try something out and not afraid to fail. Let’s face it, in this industry there is no guaranteed success. Everything needs to be tested and what works for me, might not work for you. Fear of failure can hinder even the most bright people. Even if you do fail on a campaign, take it as a learning experience, learn what you did right and what you did wrong.

They Listen
There is lots of advice out there on free and paid sites. Some of that advice is good, some of it isn’t. Either way it’s good to take it in and let it digest, even if it’s not good advice it might give you other ideas.

Obviously this list isn’t an end all be all, it’s just some of the attributes I’ve seen. Now get to work!

Just wanted to throw out a friendly reminder that we are still doing a webinar tonight with Ian Fernando and Clint Lenard about Affiliit. It’s not too late to join. If you haven’t signed up yet, here is the signup link.

It starts at 7:00pm EST.

http://ianternetmedia.com/webinars/affiliit

We hope to see you there!

Ian Fernando has been nice enough to invite Clint Lenard and Myself to speak about Affiliit and various other affiliate marketing topics at a live webinar next Wednesday (December 9, 2009) from 7:00pm to 8:00pm EST. Ian is well known in the affiliate marketing industry, we are very happy to have this opportunity to be part of this organized event and hope this may lead to future endeavors.

I really hope you can make it to the webinar!

To sign up for this FREE webinar just follow the link below.

http://www.ianternetmedia.com/webinars/affiliit/

Last night I decided to announce to the Twitter world that I was a knob, I didn’t go into any details as I was too frustrated at the moment. I have decided that now’s a good time to explain further as to why I am a knob

For an unknown reason the past few sites I have launched I have had a very tough time getting them indexed and ranking well with-in the search engines, mostly Google. I have solved this mystery. It seems that the default install of Wordpress with my cpanel is now using an enhanced Privacy Policy by default – in turn blocking search engines from crawling the site.

This is very easy to change, you just need to go into the Wordpress admin and Under Settings, Privacy Policy, select “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone…”.

I for one really hope that Wordpress changes the default back to that. I’m really frustrated and embarassed it too me this long to notice. Like I said – yes I am a knob!

So far today I have made a whopping $4.88 through Adsense. While some people may say wow that’s amazing and others will just make fun of me. Either way, it doesn’t matter! Do I use adsense as a source of income? Of coarse not. I think like everyone else when I first started designing websites I threw Adsense on them for the sake of it, this was before I knew anything about affiliate marketing and thought – hey I might be able to make some money from this! So years later (this year) I finally received my first Adsense check. You can imagine my joy – out of nowhere I get a random check from Google for years of advertising! Now that’s a business model!

But back to seriousness. I’m sure many people will find Adsense as a means of income. In my personal opinion, if you are making a reasonable amount with Adsense (not what I’m making off it! lol). I think there are better ways you could monetize your sites. CPA offers, even Yahoo advertising. I have personally talked to many people who were running strictly Adsense and after some experimenting we were able to find some CPA offers which matched the website content and demographics and there income went up substantially. Now will this work for everyone? Probably not. It can take lots of testing and experimenting to find winning combinations, however if your willing to put the time in it is very likely you will find a winner.

Now back to Adsense. Now that you’re making fun of me wondering why I am even talking about it. I had a nice friend at PPCMom who started to joke around what she was making on it, so I just had to jump in on it too. Most of us Affiliate Marketers do not rely on Adsense to make money. It seems to be more of a webmasters thing. I do not mean that condescending or anything. Affiliate Marketers have one main goal in mind – to make money. Webmasters on the other hand want to design a site, get constant visitors, it’s what they live for. It’s 2 different types of people and 2 different types of businesses and business models. However in the end there is much we can learn from each other!

So ironically I had to actually look up which domains/sites I had Adsense on as I had no idea as it’s been so long. Man those are hurting sites, they just were setup a long time ago, not much optimization, or even real design. They are like old war veterans on auto-pilot. Who knows what there next mission will be!

So by now, you probably realize this post makes no sense. As many of my friends say, after 6 I start to make no sense and its 12:30 now! Have a good night everyone!

Yes I know the design was hideous before, hopefully this new design will look a tad better. We are still playing with and testing some stuff. We hope to be adding more shortly to bring more value to this site. Stay tuned for more details!

Thanks to any and all the readers for putting up with us!

I would just like to take a moment to wish all my American friends a happy and safe Thanksgiving, Black Friday and weekend. Although I am Canadian as I get older I find myself becoming more American so to speak. For example in Canada, Thanksgiving happened about a month ago. However this year my family celebrated it both during the Canadian weekend and this weekend as well. I honestly believe part of that is due to my affiliate marketing. Before I even got involved with affiliate marketing I did have some hobbies which had me visiting the states and interacting with friendly Americans. I have noticed recently I have been interacting more and more with other affiliate marketers and thus becoming more accustom to US holidays and traditions.

I think Canada is starting to do this as well. This is the first year I have ever seen Black Friday sales in Canada. Mind you they aren’t anything as spectacular as what we see in the US, we at least get something. If you’re from America, one thing you might not know is our big sale day of the year is Boxing Day (Dec 26 – the day after Christmas). It is somewhat comparable to Black Friday in the US, however we still don’t see the same deals that we see down south! Don’t even get me started to tell you how much we can benefit from the exchange rate on currency!

Well enough of this random babbling from me for now. Have yourself a good and safe day and weekend!

Ok let’s face it, most people are trying to pitch something in some way shape or form, especially bloggers. In the Affiliate marketing industry, most people are looking out for one person and guess what – that person isn’t YOU, it’s THEMSELF! There are far too many people trying to make a living off of people new to affiliate marketing. It’s really sickening.

If you’re new to affiliate marketing, even if you’re not new, remember one thing. You do NOT NEED ANY product to become successful. All of these products that these self-proclaimed guru’s are offering will not make you rich, they may help you make money, but the keyword is HELP, they may HELP you make money. Not so much these days, but a year or two ago the big craze was keyword tools and keyword programs. They were advertised to make you think that with that tool or service, you will make money. Guess what? It isn’t that simple. If you know what you’re doing, they will come in handy and help shorten manual research, but the product alone will not make you money.

The latest trend seems to be spy tools. You get to “spy” on your competition and successful affiliates and “borrow” (steal) there campaign details. I can see why so many people would fall for this and think that something like this would make them money, but it just isn’t the case. Don’t get me wrong, I can see how these tools would be good for research purposes, but realistically if you are using these tools to there full capacity, chances are you don’t NEED them, they are just a nice addition to help save you time and you would still be making money regardless.

One of the biggest threats in my eyes are some of these self proclaimed super affiliates who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. Often they are failed affiliates and they pray on people new to this industry. Some will brag and boast of how much money they make, guess what, almost any successful affiliate is not going to just come out and tell you what they make. I’m not going to name names, I’m already involved with enough drama as it is and I don’t need to add to it, drama doesn’t make me any money.

Just remember, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. You aren’t going to start making money with out lots of hard work. I know many people are going to look at this post and question it as I am one of the owners of Affiliit. However, at Affiliit we are upfront and let people know to become successful, they will need to work for it. We can guide people through proven techniques and show them and offer help on the way, but in the end it will be their motivation and work ethic that takes them to the path of success. We only offer guidance and training, their is no get rich scheme or magic pill here. Anyone can be successful in Affiliate Marketing, it just depends on how much time, energy and money you want to invest in it.