We just got back from LA the other day and I just want to give a review of the seminar we attended while at Las Vegas. It was the first seminar we attended for people who want and are making money online. There were about 10 speakers there during the 2 day seminar with Amit being the keynote speaker. Even though the name of the seminar is PPC Live, the seminar covered a lot more than PPC. And the target of the talks were for beginners to experts in the field of online affiliate marketing. Some of the high points of the seminar were meeting Amit in person, eating breakfast with him and the readers of his blog, getting some tips from a former Google employee, tips from Kirt Christensen and just seeing how serious some of these guys were with this kind of business . There were a lot of new tricks and techniques we picked up during the talks and are implementing them this week.
The low points of the seminar were the long winded sales pitches each speaker gave after their talks to up sell the attendees on basically hand-holding workshops to implement their techniques. One speaker’s sales pitch lasted over 20 Minutes with about 50 slides showing all the ebooks his limited package included. My brothers and I were about to walk out of there. No joke. His talk was very good up to that point. But he should have known that no one wants to be sold like that. I think he had the least up sells that day. Another downer that day was meeting people who bought all the up sells but were not making a dime on the internet and people who attend these types of seminars and buy all the latest affiliate tools on the market with no real results to report. I think they are just collectors. I just wanted to tell them that you don’t need to spend any money on all that stuff, and just ONE small action of doing what they learned is a lot more helpful.
Our older brother attended the seminar too and he liked it alot. He said he learned a lot and his conclusion was – “Now I just need to do it.” This is coming from our older bro who has a PHD in Electrical Engineering. We already helped him setup a few campaigns and he is showing progress. However, the real secret was forcing him to say what he really wanted. Without a strong REASON or why behind your actions to make money online, you will never really do it. Or always have some hesitancy.
Now, I want to just end this post with one of the secrets I learned in achieving a 5 figure monthly income without adsense. And that is visualizing what I wanted. I remember about 2 years ago when my twin and I just had enough with the internet business. We had some ebooks we were selling on clickbank and were basically making about 500 bucks a month profit from them but the customer support and product developments were stressing us. It was too much work for that amount of profit. That day we told each other to just visualize checks coming in the mail. About 2 months later we got a lot more checks in the mail and we really never looked back.
I’ve been “hacking” at affiliate marketing for a month now and I feel like I need a break. It feels too much like a job. That is probably why I stopped doing affiliate marketing 2 years ago with clickbank. I like the sweet checks though. Cashing them in is always fun, but trying to scale the sales seems too tedious and not that straightforward. Increasing traffic does not equate to an increase in profit. Some people say to collect visitor emails to “hit” them up again but that is just not my style. The total profit we got through affiliate marketing last month was $5k. That is okay but looking back it was not really worth the time. I will most likely refocus on developing my sites, finishing projects, increasing my current brands, and sales of my own products and just maintain the affiliate sales.
Competition has a lot of negativity to it these days but it’s a key ingredient to your success. One of the reasons why my brother and I mastered adsense so fast and completely was because we competed against each other to see who could earn more in the early stages of our “make money with adsensegame”. Our other competitors were the guys posting on forums and thier blogs on how much they made. We wanted to beat them. But along the way, it was mainly my twin and I in head to head competition.
Even though my twin and I are on the same team so to speak we are fiercely competitive against each other and feed off of each other’s acheivements. It was Henry who first started “banking” with adsense about 2 years ago. We both had accounts that were just sitting there earning pennies a month if any for the first few months. When we got our first checks we really played to win and competed against each other and fed off of each others achievements. One whole dollar a day to 10 to 100 to 1,000 bucks a day. All throughout the way, the key driving force or motivation was competition with each other. Sharing our breakthroughs with each other propelled both of us to new levels.
I see the same thing happening with affiliate marketing right now. My twin and I are in “fierce” competition with each other for the last month or so in trying to master the affiliate marketing game. We have both setup new accounts to our favorite affiliate networks which include: neverblueads, azoogleads, clickbank, hydramedia, maxbounty, copeac. And are basically “going at it.” My strategy is going narrow in focus while Henry’s is going very board. So far, I am beating him but he is a quick learner and will adjust fast. Also its real early in the game and Henry’s profit margins are better.
I have several unfinished projects and yet I find myself constantly writing down new projects, buying domains, and thinking about ideas to develop. If you have this same habit, focus on building a steady stream of income from previous projects and invest only a partial amount of time, energy, and money into your new ideas while growing what is already working for you.
I’ve learned that one of the things you really need in this business is patience and trust. Because you cannot do everything yourself, you need to find the right people and trust them. After all this time, I still find it difficult sometimes to just wait on programmers and designers to complete a job. While you’re waiting on projects, I recommend testing out other sources of income. Recently we have been revisiting affiliate marketing and are pretty amazed at how little effort and time it takes to generate some extra passive income. We found that it takes trail and error and you have to take it really seriously to set it up correctly. Sending people to the merchant’s landing page is the basics and will generate a small ROI if any. Also the profits are not long term. You own nothing.
We have also been testing out Neverblueads and some other CPA networks. Although Neverblueads does not have a huge selection of merchants compared to some other networks, I would say that it has the best metrics and reporting.
Sometimes its healthy to just get away from all of it and just relax. The other week, when I went to see the Bourne Identity, looking to waste some time before the movie, I came across this game: Stackers. After just one try, I found it quite addicting. My twin and I actually got to the top of the Major Prize row 3 times! With a chance to win an XBOX360, Wiii and other sweet prizes. But when we went home and did a little research we found that the game is actually rigged. The last row at least. Here is a video of the game and the rigged last row.
I have been really trying to hit up affiliate marketing these last few weeks as well as working on some guides. Affiliate marketing was actually the first system I used to make money online but it never took off in terms of scaling it up to where we wanted it to be. We never took it seriously because making money with adsense was a lot easier. We put up ads on our sites and our visitors decided to click on it or not. We did not have to worry about “getting the sale” and did not have this feeling of “forcing” these offers and products onto our users. We tried many affiliate networks but most of them cater to US and Canada. So we can only push them on a few of our sites. We have also been experimenting on making better landing pages with interactivity to get users to click on the offers themselves. Most of these affiliate networks now have conversion tracking which helps this trail and error process. But this is really tedious and a lot of motivation helps. I know for a fact that top affiliates can make up to $5000 a day easily. After these few weeks we have seen just how much more profitable affiliate marketing is compared to placing adsense on a site. It does require more trail and errors though.
