Three Reasons Why I’m An Affiliate Marketer

An endeavor without a clear mission and objective is bound to fail. If you don’t have a mission or an objective driving your affiliate marketing efforts, then you’re more likely to spin in circles and never accomplish anything great. A mission statement is crucial to your online success!

Do you have a mission statement? Do you clearly know “why” you’re an affiliate marketer?

Once you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, it is easier to make all of those critical decisions such as:

• What task should I work on next?
• Will I benefit from that software, or that training resource?
• Which affiliate programs should I promote?

Those are just some examples, but I hope you can see how those questions cannot be effectively answered without a clear mission statement driving your efforts.

Your Mission Statement Is Not A Goal

Please note that a mission statement is not a goal. Your goals are based on your mission statement, and are different and separate. Here’s an example:

• Your mission statement might state that you want to earn a full time living from affiliate marketing.
• A goal based on that mission statement might be to earn $4,000 per month from affiliate marketing.

Can you see the difference?  You can even change your goal without changing the mission statement.

Now I understand that the term “mission statement” sounds like something a non-profit organization should have. It seems a bit overkill for the single affiliate marketer… especially if you’re working at this part-time. However trust me when I say it’s still important to have this defined.

So let me explain a way you can easily create your own mission statement. The way to do it is to list out the “reasons” why you are an affiliate marketer. As I just mentioned, don’t list out goals (like “I want to earn this much per month”), but instead list out the reasons why you would need that money. Perhaps it’s financial freedom, or to pay off bills, or to travel to Europe… whatever the “reason” is that you’re an affiliate marketer is your mission statement.

My Personal Reasons

Here are three reasons why I’m an affiliate marketer:

• Earn enough money to eliminate debt. This one seems obvious, but it needs to be listed. Notice that I don’t want to be rich, or have a lot of toys. I just want to get out of debt and stay out of debt. If I can accomplish that in my life, I’ll truly have wealth and I will have financial freedom.
• Have a productive hobby. This might sound corny, but we all need to have distractions from the stresses of life. We all need hobbies. Well affiliate marketing is my hobby, and it definitely is a stress reliever for me. The gravy is that I can earn a handsome profit from it too!
• Help others. One of my overall missions in life in general is to be helpful to others. Affiliate marketing can be a way to do that.

So how do my personal “reasons” for being an affiliate marketer help to guide me, keeping me on track and make critical decisions?

Here Are Some Examples

• Since one of my “reasons” is to get out of debt, I can easily calculate how much debt I have, and in how many months or years I want it to be at zero. Then I can figure out how much affiliate income I’ll need to make each month, and set goals accordingly. Also when I’m thinking about investing money for new software tools or training resources, I can weigh the potential benefits of those tools or resources against my ultimate mission of eliminating debt.
• Another “reason” is to have a relaxing hobby. Therefore, if I’m working on a campaign or project that is stressing me out, it is easier for me to let it go. A personal example of this is when I gave up my directory submission service. While it was a big money maker for me, it caused a lot of stress due to the deadlines it imposed on me. I don’t want my affiliate marketing efforts to take away from family time, but directory submissions were doing just that, so I stopped doing it.
• The third “reason” I listed was helping others. So when I am evaluating an affiliate product or program, I can evaluate if the product is really worthwhile. Will people really benefit and be helped by the product? I can also find common problems that people have, and target my affiliate campaigns in a way that provides these people with solutions to them. That way the customers are being helped, and I’m rewarded for helping them with affiliate commissions. If a program seems shady or sub-par, it’s easy for me to justify passing on it, because it doesn’t align with the reason I do this.

Conclusion

I could probably write a book full of examples of how having a mission statement (”reasons”) is key to success, but the examples listed here will have to do.

So what are the reasons you are an affiliate marketer? Please share them in the comments section below!

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Crazy End Of Summer Directory Submissions Sale

If you’ve been reading my blog the past several months, or know me from the BANS forum, then you know I’ve offered my own directory submission service. Well, I’ve decided to stop offering this, and am retiring from the directory submission service.

The good news for you is that my friend Lora is going to take over the business from me. She lives a mile and a half down the road from my house, and she’s already helped me with customers’ submission work (especially when I had a lot of orders at once). So Lora knows what to do, and she’ll do a fantastic job going forward.

Lora has decided to run a sale on the submission prices, and you can find more information on her site: Crazy End Of Summer Sale : Directory Submissions.

Are Directory Submissions Worthwhile?

Having said all that, you might be asking if directory submissions are even worthwhile nowadays. If you do a Google search, you’ll find lot’s of editorials stating not to bother.

Here’s my take on directory submissions… they’re one piece of the larger SEO puzzle. In and of themselves, you won’t rank high in the search engines just from directory submissions, but they definitely can help. They contribute by giving you more backlinks. Backlinks are backlinks, and every one helps.

If you had to spend an entire evening submitting your site to free directories yourself, then I would agree that directory submissions aren’t worthwhile. However you don’t have to do it yourself. You can have Lora perform the submissions for you very inexpensively.

So for what it’s worth, I plan on continuing to submit my new sites to free directories, and personally plan to have Lora do the submissions.

(Full Disclosure: I am not getting anything in return for recommending Lora’s service. I was just happy she was willing to take over the business… )

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What’s Worse Than Being Fired By eBay?

I realize that if you were just fired by the ePN, you’re probably in a foul mood… angry at eBay… and wondering what to do next. But imagine how you’d feel if you just lost your house to a flood, because that’s exactly the situation Rochelle is facing this weekend!

If you don’t know Rochelle, she is one of the nicest and most helpful contributors there is on the Build a Niche Store member forum.

I’ve worked with Rochelle in the past on some instructional blog posts, and I can tell you she’s a great person!

I encourage you to visit her Niche Store Strategies blog and offer any words of encouragement that you can.

Hang in there Rochelle!

(PS. Thanks to Mark @ The Niche Store Builder blog for the heads up!)

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Gears Slowed Down My WordPress

I’m using WordPress 2.6 to power this blog, as well as several other blogs I run. Being the techie that I am, when WP 2.6 was released, I had to try out all the cool new features. That included the new Turbo feature utilizing Google Gears. Yay… new stuff to play with… and severely slow down my blog’s admin interface.

The Turbo feature uses Google Gears to download many backend parts of the WordPress administrative interface to your local computer. That way when you want to do something… say publish a new post… WordPress doesn’t have to download files from your web site. They’re all sitting nice and neat on your hard drive for quick and easy access.

Or that’s how it’s suposed to work.

In my case, when I would do something new like click to write a new post, or click the “Save” button, my browser would grind to a halt for upwards of 30 seconds. This happened for me on two different computers (my new laptop and my older workstation) under both FireFox 3 and Internet Explorer 7.

Since I’m no idiot, after 3 weeks I finally decided it was time to disable the “Turbo” feature so my administrative interface would be fast again.

Except for one problem… I can’t read. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to disable the “Turbo” feature, even though when you click on the “Turbo” link in the Dashboard, it tells you what to do. I even spent time searching Google for instructions on how to disable the darn thing, but was coming up empty. Of course I was! The instructions are right in the WP Dashboard! I was just in too much of a hurry to actually read them.

So just in case you can’t read either, and found this blog post by searching the web trying to figure it out too, I’ll let you in on the secret. In FireFox, you click on the Tools menu and choose “Google Gears Settings.” Then simply click the remove link next to your blog in the list. Pretty simple really.

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Useful Free Online SEO Tools

I was browsing some SEO forums when I came across a thread listing many useful free online SEO tools. Here are the ones I bookmarked and plan to use myself:

Dig PageRank Checker
This web site will scan many Google datacenters and check your site’s pagerank at each of them. It’s really easy to use and the results come back fast.

Backlinks Checker
This site is probably my favorite of the new tools. It will scan for your site’s backlinks, and then produce a report with each of the URLs, the number of other links on the same page, the anchor text used for the link, the page’s PR, and whether or not the link is set to ‘nofollow.’ Very useful information!

Lynx Viewer
This is an online version of the text-only web browser. It’s useful because search engine spiders can only read your web site in text mode. So you can use this tool to see how your site will look to the search engines.

Cubestat
This tool is more fun than practical… unless you’re selling your web site. It estimates the value of your web site based on factors that I didn’t take the time to understand. I have no clue if the data is worthwhile, but it’s fun to plug in your own sites, those of competitors, and any other big name web site to see it’s estimated value.

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So there you have my newly discovered list of free online SEO tools. If you know of any other free SEO sites that are useful, please share them with us by leaving a comment. Thanks!

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Required phpBay Update

Wade from phpBay sent out the following e-mail to customers:

If you are using phpBay Pro 3.x for Wordpress on ANY site, it is imperative that you update it immediately to version 3.0.8 that I released tonight.

The update stems from an omission in the licensing code where instead of validating the license once, it’s revalidating it every time phpBay Pro is called, from every site, from every user, that has it installed.  This is putting an extraordinary strain on my server.

This is now fixed in 3.0.8.  The server side verification file has been renamed and after 10 days, I will remove the old one, so it’s very important to update your site(s) as soon as possible.

If you didn’t get the e-mail for some reason and use phpBay, make sure to upgrade as soon as you can!

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I Got a New Laptop (Finally)

I decided to take the plunge and purchase a new laptop for my affiliate marketing business. Actually I’ve been thinking about this for months, but I didn’t know if it was something I could afford. Yesterday while out shopping, my wife (the money miser of the family) asked if it was time to get a laptop, and had no objections to getting one right then and there. So we bought one. Read more

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How to Think Like a Marketer…

Here’s a post I wrote in the Wealthy Affiliate forums. I thought it would be helpful to my blog readers…

How to Think Like a Marketer:

Here’s the key in my opinion…

Stop trying to find a niche or a product to promote. Instead go find a problem. Seriously, just think about a problem people have in life. It could be a very generalized problem most everyone has at some point (e.g. not enough money, trying to find a boyfriend/girlfriend, etc) or a specific problem affecting only a certain amount of people (e.g. owing the IRS back taxes, adults with ADHD, etc).

Whatever, just find a problem.

Then go research your problem. Pretend that you suffer from the problem, and that you desperately want to find a solution to it. You want a way out. You want to find relief from the pain and burden this problem is placing on you.

So you go out and start doing Google searches. Not keyword research! Just pretend you’re a real person with a real problem, and start finding a solution like a normal person would through normal search engine searches (very few people have problems and seek solutions from the Google Keyword Tool ).

Start taking notes about what you find. What are the main web sites that deal with the problem? Are there support groups? Are there forums? If yes, join the forums and start reading and eventually asking questions.

Also through this searching you will naturally discover if there are products being promoted to resolve the problem. What are those products? Do they have affiliate programs? How good are the sites doing in offering the products as viable solutions to the problem?

Only after you have picked a problem and done this type of research will you begin to know if it’s something that you’re interested in pursuing, and if it will be viable. You’ll also pick up on how hungry people who really suffer from the problem are for a solution (i.e. do they just like to whine or are they really seeking a solution). Finally since you didn’t start with keyword research, your notes should contain many different areas of the problem, questions people are asking, tips and suggestions people offer, etc. You take that list and do your keyword research based on it (not the other way around).

So to recap, you don’t find a product to sell, or even a niche itself. You find the problem first. And you don’t have to think like a marketer. Instead you think like you’re a person with the problem, and you go out and find a solution to it. Then you can sound authentic when you finally begin writing articles and putting up a blog or a web site, or starting a mailing list, or whatever. Maybe you don’t have the problem yourself, but you’ve immersed yourself in it long enough to truly feel for the people that do, and you’ll have an attitude of helping them find a solution so they can get out from the pain and burden. When you truly can relate to and understand the mindset of the people who have the problem, and actually care about them and want them to find relief, you won’t have to sell anything. You’ll come across as authentic by default and they’ll be much more likely to trust anything you recommend.

My 2 cents…

PS. If you can’t find a quality product that solves the problem, then maybe YOU can create one!

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Prevent Indexing When Building a New Site

Whenever you’re building a new site, you always run the risk of having Google (or other search engines) indexing your site before it’s completed. While it’s not a death sentence for your site if this happens, things go so much smoother if you can prevent indexing until your site is ready.

So how do you prevent Google and the other search engines from indexing your site until you’re ready?

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Is Your Domain’s E-mail Setup Properly?

If you’re an affiliate marketer or just have a web site, you probably have a Linux based web host that uses cPanel. You probably even host multiple domains from the same cPanel account. However when you setup those domains, did you setup your domain’s e-mail properly? Chances are you haven’t. Let me explain…

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