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.

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/

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!

We’ll see it from time and time again. Some affiliate marketer will start up a new blog to make money. Sometimes it’s to mimic John Chow, Shoemoeny, <insert another blogger here>, etc. There are so many out there. One odd that is most of these affiliate marketing blogs do not actually talk about affiliate marketing, but that is for another story. This blog was never setup to make money. I started it as I felt this would be a good way to get out some of my thoughts and feelings of affiliate marketing and even off topic items, why? I have no idea, it felt like a good idea at the time. lol, you were expecting a better answer?

Now, by now just by looking at this, you should be able to tell I’m not your typical affiliate marketing blogger. I don’t have a super fancy theme, I don’t even know if it looks nice, it’s just simple and gets the job done! I’m not looking to impress here. On the upside, it tends to load well in most browsers. I don’t have any cartoon of myself or even a real picture of myself. Why? I have no idea, mostly because I haven’t put the time into this blog as I maybe should have. That is mostly because I’d rather put that time into projects where I make money than something I do for fun.

Content, what content? You’ll notice we rarely add new posts to this blog and it comes in spurs. I don’t know why when there are days with multiple posts that I don’t set some of them to publish on a future date to give a more reasonable break between and space them out evenly, this is just the way it happens . This is how my “creative” mind works. For a bit things spark up for a while, I get all of it out, and then when it dries up it’s back to the days on end without updates. Which I must add is a terrible way to blog. You lose readers, they lose interest as they are waiting too long for the next update. Again, some days I just sit here thinking maybe I should write a blog post, but instead I work on my campaigns!

I don’t have any fancy plug-ins or any social media integration. Why? I’m not a fan of social media (aside from advertising), I guess I might just be old or old school or just plain lazy! I just don’t know! But really, why don’t I have links to Facebook, Twitter, etc on here?

Proof reading? What is that? When my mind is on a post and I’m in the mood it just comes out and what I say stays most of the time. I don’t spend time proof-reading, brainstorming or any of that stuff that bloggers SHOULD do.

I don’t advertise my blog enough. I’m not out there replying to other people’s blog posts my url, why? I spend this time working on campaigns and projects instead. Rarely I will make a comment on a friends’ blog but that’s about it. Talk about failing at SEO and free marketing!

Oddly enough if you read this whole post and do the exact opposite you might have the blueprint for a successful blog . If this is something you want, just remember – don’t go starting a blog to make money, the majority of people that do this don’t make much. Start a blog for yourself, get it updated and filled with content and get a decent user base before you try to make money off it. Or if you’re like me and don’t care about making money off your blog – still do all that stuff anyways!

You probably didn’t know, but a while ago I posted an article on here called Acai is Pissing More and More People Off. Ironically enough that article alone has ChrisDOT.com ranking and ranking well for some Acai keywords. It’s kind of ironic how it can be so difficult to rank for keywords at times when you put a ton of effort into it. Somehow also when you put no effect into it you can rank reasonably well.

Well sorry to bore you, this was more of a general ramble than anything! You may now go back to drinking your Acai tea!

Too many times we’ve seen it. A company that is going ok or that is new and starting to build a reputation or even one that has a very good reputation – they make the one big mistake that kills them. We especially see this with affiliate networks it seems. The whole point of an affiliate network is to provide a protective buffer between the affiliate and advertiser. They are to provide cash flow, support and more.

So what happens when the advertiser doesn’t pay the network? If the leads are fraudulent, then obviously the affiliate will eat the loss. But what happens if they leads are ok? Who takes the loss? This is when you will see the different between the good and crappy networks. The good networks will eat the loss and pay the affiliate, they will do whatever they can to keep there reputation. The bad networks? I think we all know what happens there.

In this business word travels fast. With the amount of forums, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc – it only takes a matter of minutes for info to get around.

Now, as a business what seems like the smarter move? Not pay your affiliate, they will trash you, word will spread and no one will want to do business with you. Or do you pay your affiliate, get them to tell everyone “hey the advertiser didn’t pay this network, but they paid me”, what do you think will work better in the long run? Isn’t that money put to good use by helping increase your reputation? Of course it is.

This just goes out to remind everyone, be careful of who you deal with. Make sure they have a good reputation and a good business sense. This extends further than just networks. If you contract someone out to do services, your name could be on the line. The last thing you need is a 3rd party contractor ruining your name.

Keep your reputation. Money will come and go, a negative reputation will haunt you forever.

I’m sure if you follow Affiliit on twitter (http://www.twitter.com/Affiliit) you will see several success stories post. If you’re a member of Affiliit you will see even more on the forums. One of our long serving members hit a milestone for him recently and I couldn’t help but dedicate a blog post for it.

We at Affiliit are very proud of this member and want to publically recognize his success. James had his highest profit day on Oct 19, 2009!

He managed to rake in $1461.88! Remember this is profit. James had this success by working with Facebook.

Please join me in recognizing James’ great accomplishment. This didn’t happen overnight. I know James has put in lots of time and money testing and tracking and just learning how to get it done right. James is proof that if you put in the time, you will profit!

Thank you James and good luck in the future from all of us at Affiliit!

Many people have recently been asking me what makes Affiliit a good internet marketing training course or what makes Affiliit different than the competition. Of coarse every site owner is going to think there site is the best, if they didn’t then they are either in the wrong mindset or they are doing something wrong.

Affiliit focuses on several aspects of Internet Marketing, most training programs just focus on 1 aspect such as seo, ppc, article marketing, etc. Affiliit takes the all around approach and finds way to train and combine as many different aspects as possible.

Like many other Internet Marketing Training courses, Affiliit offers progressive monthly training. Each month more information is revealed, new techniques are released. Affiliit is designed on this platform, we make sure that what you learn in month 1 will benefit you in month 2 and what you learn in month 2 will benefit you in month 3 and so on.

Affiliit has 2 full time internet marketing trainers/mentors. Affiliit also has a large library of videos and more are constantly being added. Affiliit also has a HUGE selection of tools, currently the tool count is just over 90 tools. That’s 90 ways that Affiliit helps simplify you making money.

Affiliit also has there own affiliate program, for each member you refer you get 50% recurring commission, so based on a $47 monthly membership, affiliates receive $23.50 each sign-up each month for as long as that person remains a member of the program. That can be huge!

Affiliit is an amazing place to Learn Internet Marketing. Ask anyone who is currently a member, the general consensus is Affiliit is the place to be and the place to learn.

For the next week and a half you can try out Affiliit for only $1. Does that seem too good to be true? It isn’t! If you aren’t happy then just don’t renew your membership. For $1 you can’t go wrong!

Learn Internet Marketing at Affiliit