Why on earth would anyone who has a list of subscribers want to promote someone else’s affiliate link for a product launch, instead of their own…

I’ve actually done exactly that twice this week, and it’s not the first time I’ve done it.

~##~

Fair Warning: I gotta warn you here, this is the longest blog post I’ve ever done, it’s over 2,500 words…

I hope it’s worth reading, but feel free skip bits when you think I’m “rambling”.

As a reward for reading it, there’s 2 x $50 cash (you need a paypal account to receive it) up for grabs somwhere down the bottom, but for the question to make sense, you will need to read at least some of the post…

~##~

I earn a living online, and promoting things to my subscribers is a significant part of that income, although I am fortunate (or maybe I’ve just been doing this long enough) that I have enough other income streams (always important for a healthy business) that I don’t have to rely on this one method of making money, which grants me a certain degree of freedom, as I mentioned in my last post.

Share This

Many affiliate marketers seem to just use the standard promotional emails that they’re provided with by a product owner and simply blast it out to their list.

You’ve gotta ask yourself whether they’ve actually taken the time to read the report, or check out the product, that they are promoting to see if it’s good or not.

I know this can be tempting as it’s a lot quicker and easier than the alterntive, which is to actually review the product, but I prefer to take the review route as it has some pretty cool benefits..

Earlier this week JD Swanson and Jason James launched a new report called Mafioso Marketing.

As I’ve worked with Jason a few times in the past he was kind enough to give me a copy of the report to review.

The report is 69 pages long and I ended up writing over 1,500 words about it, which took me over 3 hours, I didn’t just skim the report..

Share This

There was a time when I was “scared” of using outsourcing for my online business, not anymore..

Working online is fun, but to really turn it in to a profitable business you have to “leverage” your time as mush as you can, and the best way to do that is without a doubt to use cheap outsourcing services to get a lot of the basic (boring) day to day stuff done.

I now have at least one job or product of some sort being worked on for me somewhere in the world at any one time, usually more than one, but taking that first step can be a bit daunting, for the same old reason that doing anything “new” can be difficult, it’s out of our “comfort zone”…

With outsourcing though I’ll warn you right now that it can quickly become quite addictive to get other people to do all those boring tedious jobs for you for just a few dollars an hour, like getting backlinks..

but the most profitable way of outsourcing is to have products developed for you.

Share This

As I’ve got several info products, now and more on the way, I decided a little while back to get a support desk system set up.

I tried using a couple of the free ones that are available in the cPanel Fantastico script library, but couldn’t get the one’s I liked the look of to work properly, so I ended up doing some research in to other free scripts that are available.

I picked one from MaianScriptWorld in the end and I’ve been very pleased with it so far.

It’s not as sophisticated as many of the paid one’s, but it does allow for different “departments” (for different products), ticket tracking, different admins, so you can outsource the support and keep an eye on your outsource staff, as well as a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) and email notifications of new support tickets.

It’s actually been well worth the time to set up, as people seem more willing to wait for a support ticket to be answered than they are with an email.

Share This

Internet Marketing is a lot easier now than it was just a few years ago simply because of the level of automation that can be used.
 
This post was actually posted to my blog while I was out looking for a new place to live, as I’m in the process of getting divorced and moving house..

I wrote it (or am writing it) on Wednesday evening and set it up to auto post while I was out.

Using WordPress for blogging means I can write several posts in one session and then set them up to automatically “appear” on my blog over the next few days, so I can forget about it and get on with other things.

I’ve done a video showing how to use this feature of wordpress here:
Useful Blogging Tutorial Videos

You can do the same thing with newsletter broadcasts using AWeber, setting up a week or more’s worth of broadcasts in one go and then forget about it until they’ve all been sent.

Share This

Giveaway events have become very popular in internet marketing as a quick way of “building your list”, so much so that it’s actually hard to keep up with all the ones that are going on, let alone take part in them, as to be effective you really need soemthing of value to offer to each new one.

There’s a new one launching today, as usual I’ve posted about it on my internet marketing reviews blog, and this is one that I am involved in, as one of the marketers behind it is a guy who I chat with about marketing and blogging a great deal, Dan McGonagle.

Stuart Sterling and James Brown are the other two partners behind this and they’ve put together some pretty high quality stuff for the freebies, including a pretty special offer from your’s truly that’s part of the “One Time Offer”, and Dan twisted my arm quite hard to get this one out of me, as it’s something I wasn’t planning on doing..

you can check it out here:
IM Giveaway Event

Share This

In my last post I mentioned how important it is to check products out before promoting them, sometimes going so can actually help out the person who’s product it is..

Last week Ben Shaffer, another marketer who I do respect, contacted me to ask if I’d test out a new product of his, as he knows I have sites on quite a few hosts, so I could test it out on some that he hadn’t been able to.

The first host I put it on threw up some problems and we managed to get the sorted out, which has probably saved him a few support headaches down the line.

The cool thing for me is I’ve eneded up with a free copy of a script that is VERY useful for my business, you can read about it on my internet marketing review blog, but it’s basically a script to automatically check your Clickbank account(s) and let you know when you make a commission, which saves me quite a bit of time each day..

Share This

I get a LOT of JV requests, usually 15 to 20 a week at least, so there’s no way I can check out all of them, let alone promote them all, not that I’d want to, some just aren’t good enough..

and just one bad product promo can piss off a lot of subscribers and wipe away all the trust you’ve spent months building up.

I learnt this the hard way over a year ago when I promoted an info product that looked good.
I had taken the time to get a copy myself and have a look, but I hadn’t read the ebooks included in enough detail and missed the fact that the info offered was not only fairly basic, but some of it was totally out of date.

The promo brought in quite a lot of sales, as the sales letter for the product was excellent, but I realised something was wrong a day later when I saw that the refund was well over 50% in just the first day!!!

Share This