Chris Barclay at Work

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.

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!

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

When you first start out in Affiliate Marketing – your working hard to make your first buck. You probably have some long term goals but most likely none of them are to diversify to other networks and other sources of advertising. Most people probably start off with advertising with Google Adwords and pick 1 or 2 networks to run offers from and work like that for a while.

I know I started out like that. I was always telling myself – ok, next month, then the month after, then the month after – I’m going to start advertising with other avenues and running offers from more networks. I don’t know why I procrastinated so long, I guess because things were going so well I thought to myself “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Then the inevitable happened – My first Google slap. I panicked at first and couldn’t believe it. Although before I was always as aware of the slap but never felt the wrath.

At that moment, I know I couldn’t procrastinate anymore and I started doing what I should have done already, I signed up and put money into Yahoo and MSN. Now if I get slapped on Google I’ll still have ads running and income coming in right? Well not exactly. After a while – my web host went down for a few hours. I was lucky enough to catch it very early on and pause my campaigns so I wasn’t sending too much traffic to nothing. This essentially means lost money due to wasting money on sending traffic to nothing as well as no income for that time.

Now I was thinking of how to avoid this in the future. There were several options – VPS, dedicated hosting or get another hosting company. I decided for my current budget, income, expenses, etc – to go with another hosting company so I can split campaigns across the 2. Obviously in the future either a VPS or dedicated server is a something that will be taken into consideration again.

Ok so nothing can go wrong now right? Well what happens when the advertisor tells your network they don’t like your traffic anymore. You better have a few good campaigns going at the same time or your going to run into some problems.

The moral of the story is diversify as much as possible, always have a backup and backup plan. Since my first Google slap I have survived many with minimal effects, have you?