Chris Barclay at Work

Too often new affiliates get blown away with the whole Super Affiliate mindset thinking they need to become huge and become huge right away.

When starting off – focus on the little things, start small and make reasonable goals.

Ok, so you’re starting off – you see tons of people making (or at least claiming to be making) thousands a month on affiliate marketing. It’s easy to get your hopes up and think that you’ll be making that right away as well. Anyone that is making a living by Affiliate Marketing is doing so because they have put in the time, effort and money. It doesn’t happen by accident, nor does it happy over night.

Remember – we all started somewhere.

So $100 a day seem like a lot? How about $10 a day? Or even $5 a day? Why not focus on getting 1 campaign to $10 profit a day. Then after that instead of trying to massively scale that, start another one and get that to $10 a day. Now do that over and over again. Soon enough you’ll be at $100 a day, then $200 a day, $500 a day and so on. And — in the unfortunate event that your campaign is taken offline you will have several others up and you’ll barely notice it as you will have several others still making a reasonable amount.

Everyday you hear about someone copying or stealing someone else’ work. It happens in Affiliate marketing and every other industry.

What would you do if you were copied? How would you feel?

I found out first hand this week, one of my landing pages was copied word for word, as well as my images. The weird thing is it gave me the drive to try to find what I can improve, when I saw my wording on someone else’ page it made me realize what I could and should change. After the changes I made my CTR went up.

While people copying your work can be annoying and frustrating, it can help you work harder. You always need to put in the extra work to stay ahead of the competition. It keeps you on your toes.

So when you wake up one morning and find your landing page(s) have been stolen – don’t freak out or get worried. Just take a look at it and try to think of what you can do to improve your page.

If your lucky they might even have left their contact information if you do a domain whois, but don’t count on it!

So a day in the life of Chris took an interesting twist the other day. Many of you know I like to network with other affiliate marketers and people in similar industries.

Just a few days ago I was contacted by a member of Facebook who has seen my site as well as comments of mine on Blogs and he wanted to help me with my ads in getting them approved and just helping me in general.

This came as a huge surprise as I have always understood Facebook to have limited contact with their advertisers and for them to reach out was unexpected.

So kudos to the Facebook (and any other company who’s) reps who go the extra mile to help people out.

You don’t update it enough

To have a successful blog you need to update it often, once or twice a day or at least once every other day. There is nothing more annoying than someone who does not update their blog often enough. Yes I am aware of the irony as I have not updated this site in a while But you need to get new posts up and running as quickly as possible.

You update it too much

Yes it is possible to have too much of a good thing. If you update your page too much visitors could get bored and have a hard time keeping up with the new content. Also having a 1 or 2 line post every few hours is garbage. Come up with some nice rich content.

You don’t promote it

Guess what kiddies – your blog or website isn’t going to get visitors on it’s own. You need to get out there and promote it. Get out on other blogs and websites and promote yourself – DON’T SPAM, just promote.

Over Advertising

Some people think their readers are morons (some blog readers are morons) – you shouldn’t over do the ads. I know I have a few banners but that’s as far as I want to go. I’m back and forth on them right now. I only have them in case I help someone out they might want to give me a referral

Your posts SUCK

Writing posts on irrelevant topics don’t get you any brownie points with your audience. Except maybe in John Chows case where he posts pictures of what he eats. Most of the time that crap won’t fly. Writing repetitive posts are just as bad, if your readers already read it a month ago, why would they want to read it again just reworded?

My apologies go out to Shoemoney regarding his newsletter and his Facebook code not working. Turns out I made the common mistake and selectively read information on this.

Recently Shoemoney released a newsletter, one of the main “selling points” for signing up was a free $50 Facebook coupon. I signed up for the newsletter in hopes of getting the Facebook coupon. I received an e-mail today of the newsletter and it had a facebook coupon code in it.

So to make a long story short, the coupon did not work. It’s not a new marketing technique to promise something for a sign up but not deliver.

Was this just a mistake or was it just a false promise marketing gimmick? We’ll soon see

I’ve sent Shoemoney a few messages to inquire about this so we should have the answer shortly.

Finally after a few tries I’ve gotten some Facebook ads approved!

How you may ask?

I tried several different products/services and just tried simple things like changing the ads and pictures. I’m still shocked at how inconsistant Facebook is. You can submit the exact same ad that’s already there, same picture too and it will get declined.

Is anyone else still playing around with Facebook?

So it’s been a while since I did anything with Facebook so I thought I’d give it a try again. Damn I forgot how inconsistant their reviewers were and how hard it is to get some campaigns/ads approved. Sending in the 3rd wave of ads to see if I can get them by now

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.

So recently I’ve noticed a few blog posts on ethics in affiliate marketing. Most notably were the blog posts from Bryn Youngblut and Uberaffiliate. Now I don’t want to come in and repeat what either have said because that would be pointless, besides I have a different views on the subject.

First and foremost people these days need to learn to read the fine print and understand what they are getting themselves into. Day in and day out people will sign up and sign their name to documents without having a full (or even any) understanding of what they are signing up for and what the terms and conditions are. I don’t know about everyone else, but if I go to the bank and fill out any paperwork, I read it first before signing it. I need to know what I am getting myself into before signing my life away.

I know many people don’t associate whats online with whats real but if your dealing with financial information you really need to treat it the same. With Payday loans and credit cards being a HUGE market in affiliate marketing, often people get roped into huge interest rates and crappy terms because they didn’t read all the information presented to them.

Now when it comes to other offers such as Acai Berry, Green Tea, and other products which offers a “free trial” where you “only pay shipping and handling” then get charged down the road, it’s the same thing, it’s all noted in the fine print but when people say free and limited time offer it encourages them to fill out the forms as quickly as possible and often reading the terms and conditions get skipped.

Now do I agree with these shady tactics? Of coarse not. However like everything else – it is buyer beware. Know what your getting yourself into. Though I don’t agree with some of these companies, I have no moral dilemma promoting them. Do you think the kid at the McDonalds counter feels morally or ethically bad for serving fat people cheeseburgers? Do you think the person at the gas station selling people cigarettes feels bad? Of coarse they don’t – they just do their jobs because they need to get paid. To me, there is little difference between them and us (in that aspect at least).

Another thing to take into consideration – a fair bit of affiliate marketing is done through search engines, so realistically people are searching for these offers, you are not shoving the offers down their throats or holding a gun to their head making them sign up.

So after reading this I’m sure some of you think I have no morals and ethics or don’t agree with me. I do what I need to do to be successful, if you don’t promote these offers someone else will, I may as well be the person getting your could be traffic/leads