The 2% Affiliate Club

It’s been said that out of all the affiliate marketers out there tauting products and services, only about 2% make it to Super Affilate status – the elite income generators. Why? It’s their Mental Attitude. The lack of motivation, or losing motivation hurts the other 98%. So how can we keep motivated?

I read an interesting post today from Ted Murphy. In it he ponders on his home’s buying/gutting/refurbushing experience. Most of the work he did himself, and he did a fanstastic job. His quandary deals with being bit hard by the construction bug and wanting (needing) to keep building, albeit not knowing what. I don’t think that appetite may ever be satisfied, as he is always building, be it houses or business, and he’s very good at it.

Which brings me back to performace or affiliate marketing. Are we always building? If we are to grow our IM businesses, we need to set bigger goals. Amit Mehta describes a very powerful technique for doing so as “Shooting For the Moon”, which focuses on setting “impossible” goals, instead of “realistic” goals. Some would argue this sounds like nourishing the propensity for failure. But that’s not it at all. The idea is to set a goal that motivates you to excel by pushing you out of your comfort zone. For example, after evaluating your present income stream, “shoot for the moon” by setting a goal that is 10X your present revenue. The “impossible” becomes possible because we tune our minds to believe the impossible is realistic, which breeds a new level of success that is fueled by forcing our minds to think at a higher level.

Too bad only 2% of affiliates think this way…

PPC Affiliate Keywords – Going Wide Instead of Deep

It seems like a daily ritual: a client calls me wanting assistance with his SEO initiatives and asks me what keywords he or she should optimize. I, of course, appreciate the vote of confidence, but I’m not his SEO consultant. Which brings up a good question – what are the best keywords?

This same question comes up as a PPC Affiliate Marketer. You start a campaign and now need to generate an Adwords keyword list to send traffic to your landing pages. This can be tricky, as many newbie affiliates loose their shirts in PPC, because they THINK they have a great keyword list when in fact, it’s too deep, and not wide enough.

One of the 1st things Amit teaches in his affiliate training is that effective keyword research is one of the most important skill sets you’ll need to develop as an Affiliate, especially if you are to reach Super Affiliate status. So lets go over going Deep vs. Wide.

Suppose you’re a newbie affiliate, promoting a hypothetical virtual car dealer. You know nothing about cars, so you head over to wordtracker to come up with a bunch of keywords to bid on Google.

Your “thorough” list includes all the fathomable keywords with the root “car”. So you take your list thinking you’ll make a killing, only to find out you generated very litle traffic and consequently zero commissions. Here’s why: When you are searching for a “car” on google, more than likely you won’t include the word “car” as part of your keyword, but probably will use sports sedan, convertible coupe, Lexus IS250, Cadillac Escalade, SUV, etc. These are descriptive or synonimous keywords (as Amit describes them) that people will search for. That’s the difference between going deep vs. going wide. So always go wide first. When when you find which of these keywords provide the best traffic, THEN go deep.

I have this conversation multiple times each day with clients. Hmm, maybe I am their SEO consultant.

I need to charge more…

Super Affiliate 101

I’ve been following Super Affiliate Marketer Amit Mehta for quite sometime now. He was a guest visitor on the Black Ink Project that Jeremy Palmer masterfully (seriously!) put together earlier this year and I was captivated by his success and his wealth of knowledge in the space. Affiliate PPC marketing is something I’ve always been intrigued with and wished to learn. Amit is a PPC guru and his blog posts consistently provided tips of the golden nugget variety.

As it turns out, Amit decided to teach others what he knows in an online coaching program called PPC Classroom2. The course offers a series of in-depth modules on becoming an affiliate shogun. The course teaches students how to:

Find & evaluate Affiliate offers and niches that will perform
Create effective keyword lists
Create profitable Adword campaigns
Create presell landing pages that convert
Do split testing and bid optimization

I joined the course to test the waters and it reached capacity right after I enrolled. I’ll periodically post about my progress and setbacks (gasp)…