Chris Barclay at Work

I don’t know about everyone else but I’m pretty sure that most people have encountered this. The other day I was talking to someone who was really eager to get started in Affiliate Marketing and PPC advertising. He has spend hours and even days reading blogs, forums and other resources. (yeah he probably read some ebooks too, sucker!)

He asked if I could go over one of my campaigns with him. We agreed I’d go over one of my campaigns which did well but is currently dying down. I believe in helping people, but I don’t agree with free hand-outs – it would only hurt both of us and possibly more.

So I pretty much went through start to finish on the campaign. I showed him some examples of keywords, ads, landing pages, php redirects, etc. At the end of the conversation – he started to tell me how I have done some stuff wrong and would be making tons more if I did it right. I asked him how he “knew” what I did was “wrong”. Turns out he READ it somewhere on a forum, so therefor it must be true.

I went into greater detail and showed how I did what he considered was “right”, then when I split tested what he said was “wrong”, my EPC and profit went up. He still would not believe me, according to him I should change this back to the way which is “the right way”.

Just because someone or some people say something, does not mean it’s true. You need to do your own testing. You need to figure things out for yourself. Really – if everyone says do something one way and you find a better way that will make you more money, which are you going to choose?

This is why experience and testing will always be better than any knowledge or “facts” you can read. Don’t be afraid to be different – you may loose some money testing it out, but you also may learn a new way to turn a better profit.

One of my niche sites which I’ve dubbed part of my “SEO Project” took a jump in visitors yesterday. After looking through my traffic to see where most of it came from – it was plain old organic searches, mostly for a specific term.

Early in the day yesterday something happened in that niche, while it wasn’t something huge or ground breaking it was something and it appeared to be a hot topic. I immediately added information for that topic/event to my niche website.

By the end of the day I saw most of my figures double for yesterday compared to regular days and most of the traffic came from that search term for the info I recently added to the site. Today I am still seeing a big jump over regular day traffic, most due to the same search term.

So kids it just proves you need to stay on top of things in your niche, as soon as more information is available – get it up on your site! This also worked for me because my site is optimized well for SEO and the new information I posted got cached in Google very quickly.

In Affiliate Marketing (and among other things) it is important to have motivation to succeed. Everyone has different hopes and dreams and everyone has a different reason for being motivated and wanting to succeed.

I am lucky – I have a general will and want to succeed and be become successful. Unfortunately this isn’t enough for some people. Ironically enough I’ve been thrown some twists and turns that make me want and even need to succeed even more.

My wife was recently let go from her job. We recently found out she’s pregnant. Now with a baby on the way we need to move to a larger place to live. While this is a fair bit to take on at once, it made my rise to the occasion and I’ve taken some risks that I normally wouldn’t have and for the most part they have paid off.

If you find yourself struggling to get motivated, set some small term goals for yourself. For Affiliate Marketing some Examples could be – your first $1000 profit month, go out for a nice dinner. Your First $2500 month, go buy yourself a nice shiny 24″ monitor and so on and so on – but you get the point. Then stick to your goals, if you don’t make them try harder next month to get what you wanted. Just remember set your goals realistic so you’ll stay motivated.

So with all this being said — what’s your motivation?

There is a famous saying that goes “measure twice, cut once”. It’s a very good statement to follow in any business. While you may not be measuring or cutting anything per say in affiliate marketing, the same idea holds true – you can never check too many times.

I’m sure if you have done any affiliate marketing by now you’ve probably made a mistake only to find out about it later on. Unfortunately if your running PPC campaigns – you are paying for useless clicks if your landing page isn’t working properly. I know myself I have done this several times, I don’t like to admit it, but it happens.

It seems to happen more so after you have perfected your landing pages, then after you make a little tiny small adjustment and either just forget to check it after or think there is no way what you did could change anything crucial. Guess what – you need to test it even if it’s the smallest change.

Be sure to check out your landing pages in other browsers as well. Ensure you at least test it with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. It can’t hurt to check it in Google Chrome as well even though it is apparently based off the same platform as Opera.

Don’t risk wasting any money. Always double-triple-quadrouple check your landing pages and any other websites you use.

So recently I’ve had a few different people ask me if I know of any good ebooks to start learning the affiliate marketing world. Please do not waste your money on any ebook. You will find that same information on free blogs and forums. If you are really inclined to spend money to learn – find a service like PPC-Coach that will guide you through ways to make money and not just leave you hanging with information you can find anywhere.

I remember a while back I had a friend who bought an ebook, its name was How to make hundreds a day with $0 cost to you or something cheesy like that. I don’t know how much he paid for it, I hope not a lot. Pretty much it went into detail to create a fake gmail account and setup an auto reply directing whoever e-mails you to a dating site with your affiliate link. Then promoted you to spam sites like craigslist and gumtree and act like a single female to try to get those lonely guys to e-mail you. Once they e-mailed you they of coarse got the auto reply begging them to go check out your pics and profile at your dating affiliate link.

By the time that ebook was released that whole method was extremely saturated and craigslist was catching on. Thus making it an outdated method to make cash. Also lets face it, who wants to be a spam artist?

Realistically if someone has a good ground breaking way to make bank, odds are they aren’t going to package it up into a little ebook and sell it for a small modest fee. They are going to keep it to themselves and keep profiting off of it.

So kids, please save your money and don’t buy those crappy ebooks. If you really can’t control yourself and you must, just send me payment and I’ll write one for you

The answer is nothing. Regardless of who you are, who you know or how much you know – you are going to fail in this business. You will fail several times, guaranteed!

In Affiliate Marketing you succeed by failing! Sounds crazy doesn’t it? Well it is and isn’t! If you keep failing and end up with nothing to show then you will probably never succeed. If you keep failing and learn something each time, you will probably be able to take that knowledge and eventually get some success as long as you don’t give up.

Once you start pumping out some successful campaigns you will get an idea of what works and in the future you will probably fail less as you will have a better idea of what works. You still need to try to learn, you always need to be learning and stuffing your head with precious knowledge in this industry. No successful affiliate marketers have gotten to where they are without failing! Your not alone.

Some people are afraid of failure, what if your that type of person? Either suck it up and learn how to accept and learn from it or stay at your day job.

I’m off, back to failing!

Affiliate Marketing, like everything else requires good budgeting, especially when getting started.

Not only do you need to budget money but time as well. When your starting off you need to set a budget on how much you can spend and realize at first you will be loosing money while you learn how to setup, optimize and scale campaigns. Money only goes so far, you gotta be prepared to wait a while before receiving any payment from networks.

Many networks are on a net 30 schedule. Which means they do not issue you payment until 30 days after the last day of the month. So really if I started off this month (Oct), Payment for this month would not be issued until Nov 30 or Dec 1. Then of coarse you need to wait for our great postal service for delivery (assuming your on checks and not paypal or wire transfers), and you may possibly need to wait for your bank to process it.

To sum it up, you need to make sure you have enough money to budget for 2 or 3 months before you can expect to start receiving payments from networks (assuming you’re generating leads/sales).

Now as everyone says – time is money. You gotta use your time wisely – get rid of your Distractions! Manage your time across all the campaigns your working on, it does not need to be evenly. Just keep in mind if you’re spending more time on 1 campaign then others – make sure it’s worth it.

You need to figure out for yourself how much time you need to spend optimizing campaigns and how much to spend creating new campaigns.

With all of that being said, don’t forget to take a break once and a while, give your brain a break – then come back refreshed.

You want to get the most out of yourself? Get rid of the distractions!

Do you ever find yourself working away then out of nowhere you get drawn away from work to a phone call, IM or something else? Do you find yourself getting bored while working and wandering off to twitter, wickedfire or other websites?

I’m willing to bet your not the only one. I fall into this trap sometimes as well. Some days I just can’t seem to stay motivated and focused. Once that happens productivity drops! Time is money, so I need to be focused all the time so I can be as productive as possible.

How do I get around this? Personally I either ignore it all or sometimes even go as far as unplugging the phone, turning off the cell phone, closing MSN Messenger and closing off anything not related to what I’m working on. Then I run upstairs or run to the washroom or grab a drink and come back to get a fresh start and go at it full force.

Do you get distracted? How do YOU deal with it??

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There’s a somewhat famous saying:

It is better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you are a fool than open it and remove all doubt.

Among other things this all applies to Affiliate Marketing and really any 9-5 job. Let’s face it – no one really cares what you make or how smart you are!

I just see it time and time again where someone just starts to make some bank then they go on forums, blogs and everywhere else boasting and bragging about how great they are, when in reality who cares?

Stay humble – you will not only learn more, but you will be better liked