chrisg.com

Since I wrote about affiliate marketing I have had quite a lot of feedback. While there are a lot of people saying they are cautiously going to give it a go, many more have told me one of two things:

1. I didn’t make a lot of money right away so I gave up!
2. I’m removing all other monetization methods and going 100% aff!

Woooah!

Yes there is a great deal of money to be made in affiliate marketing, and it is possible to get a nice fat windfall occasionally, I did not intend to give anyone the impression it is all or nothing. In most cases the situation does not end up being home run or drought.

As with any blog revenue method it is all about trying things out, experimenting, and making incremental improvements.

I know what it is like, it is discouraging to try something and not see tangible results right away. Even more so when you are built up on it being the answer to all your prayers. But you must persist. When you succeed or fail, ask yourself why. In many cases the people who stumble a few times are those who make the best success longer term, they have learned lessons the people who have early success never do.

The great thing about affiliate marketing using blogs is it doesn’t cost anything to promote an offer. If you do it authentically and ethically there is zero risk. That means it doesn’t hurt to try and the offer doesn’t have to pay off right away. For a while now I have focused on clients and freelancing so my affiliate efforts have withered and I have long lost my first page rankings, but I still get lots of pleasant surprises in the form of commission cheques, sometimes for offers I can’t remember promoting.

Darren makes thousands each month from Amazon alone, that is without adding in income from the other programs he promotes. Adding appropriate Amazon links helps your reader find a good place to find a product, rather than looking sleazy it is friendly. You are probably going to get a product shot from there to illustrate your post anyway.

When Yaro tells you he makes a healthy mid 4 figures a month (probably sometimes more, this is Yaro we are talking about!) from affiliates alone, he is not talking about one super performer. In fact I am sure he would caution you against putting all your income eggs in one affiliate basket.

Think about it, this is a very powerful thing! How many posts will you create after a year? How many of those posts can legitimately carry an affiliate link? If you are in a product-rich niche then you are looking at a lot of posts, articles where the audience will expect shopping links. One sale from half would still add up to a sum that most people would be pleased with.

Of course the upside is you might find a great performer in one or two. That’s when the real fun starts. When you do
find a great converting offer it is time to put all your blogging skills behind it. Drive more traffic, write more posts, find intersections between the topic and your readers interests and needs.

Depending on your niche and your traffic this technique might not be right for you. All I would say is don’t dismiss it too early. It could be you miss out on something great, and I am sure you would change your mind when a nice affiliate commission arrives in the mail!

Picture cropped from a photograph by Yomanimus

It was interesting to see Yaro talk about Affiliate Marketing as I had also been having a discussion on the topic and wanted to share my own advice. Do check out Yaro’s post. The key point I want to repeat is this one:

Those early days taught me that patience is a virtue when it comes to building an affiliate marketing business based on a blog. I’ve learned a lot about what goes into effective affiliate marketing since then, yet in many ways, I still walk into most promotions completely blind and with little expectation. You never know how well something will sell and I’m constantly surprised by my results.

Many people go into each monetization technique thinking “this is the one where I make the fast, big bucks”. Yes, you can make money, good money, with affiliate offers, but do not be disappointed if you don’t buy that Ferrari right away.

Some people will know I started my online marketing career in the traditional way, building websites for companies, helping them sell everything from tomato ketchup to condoms. Having several successful campaigns under my belt I had to see if I could make money for myself as opposed to helping billion dollar companies make more billions. It turned out affiliate marketing on a shoe string was not quite the same as promoting the official site of a well known brand.

When you start out with affiliate deals there are three things that happen:

1. You get lucky and make a lot of money without knowing exactly how
2. You make a small amount of money, slowly
3. You lose a lot of money in PPC fees

For me I experienced all three. My first experience convinced me that I was a master marketer and before long I would be taking early retirement. Unfortunately competition soon moved in and wiped me out. My next attempts had me in the second two categories.

You can make a great deal of money with Affiliate marketing. I would say for most people they can make more money with Aff than advertising and certainly more than adsense. Most niches have a product or ten you can promote this way. The only thing to beat aff is to have your own products, but I don’t believe for most people they would need to be mutually exclusive. Most of the internet marketing gurus make as much money promoting each other as they do their own stuff.

I would say the “GoogleCash” method, where you drive traffic to offers using Adwords ads, while probably being the fastest route, is the most risky in terms of your own money. Blogging and small web sites combined with SEO are the safest. Luckily any losses I made were more than compensated when I finally found offers I could promote, had mastered the techniques and had Google Adwords battle scars to prove it. Around the time I made my money back I decided the pure affiliate stuff wasn’t for me and moved into just blogging.

The key for bloggers, particularly Authority Bloggers, is to not abuse the trust of your audience. Only recommend things you personally believe in.

You will see on this blog while I do not display advertising and make most of my income through selling services, I do occasionally post an affiliate link. On my photography blog there are a few more. Those links haven’t made me a fortune by any means, but they have brought in additional money, and all were for products I would vouch for. That would be my recommendation for how to get started, sign up for Amazon associates and do some book reviews, or find a merchant in your niche with an affiliate program that you can honestly recommend.

While it is true the more traffic you have the more money you will make, it is also true that with Aff the right audience is more important than scale. A smaller but more motivated audience will always beat a massive but disinterested one. I made several hundred dollars from an extremely niche product, a wireless flash slave unit sold on eBay with my DSLR Photography Blog because the audience and product was a 100% match.

Have you tried affiliate marketing? Think you will give it a go? Tried and didn’t like it? Share your thoughts in the comments …

As most people who read this blog know, giving away information is what I do. I write, answer emails, give away ebooks, give talks.

Thankfully I also pay the bills. The way I do that is by charging for information. Specific, bespoke advice, workshops, consulting calls, teaching classes.

So many times people have queried the strategy, they do not understand that I get to charge because of all the stuff I give away. As Chris Anderson says though in this interview, it is a model that works:

“The internet has enabled lots of businesses and business models to go digital. And one of the economic advantages of digital is that the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution are zero, or close to it. This means that you can now experiment with giving away one thing to sell something else.

“It’s no surprise that virtually all businesses on the internet are based on ‘free’ in one way or another.

“It can be just advertising-supported - where you give away one product to sell attention to advertisers. Or it can be an inversion of the traditional sample model. Rather than giving away 1% of the products as samples to sell 99%, you give away 99% of the product as free samples to sell 1%. This is what’s called the ‘freemium’ model.”

The challenge comes when people get so used to seeing you as a free source of information that they get odd about having to pay.

Thankfully my friend Liz Strauss has rescued me from this trap with a simple model to follow (check out the full article):

Now that I see I already have a working system, it’s easy to decide who gets how much for free. When people I hardly know asks me to do their homework now, I simply say, “I can tell you where you’ll find what you need.

If they push for me to help them, I say, “If you’d like me to do that for you, we’ll need a more formal arrangement to cover my time. I charge $XXX/hour for that sort of work.”

While your business model might depend on and benefit from giving away free information and ideas, it should never be free at the expense of your business. Your advice has value but only to the level you allow it.

Today I have something for you to think about. I figure this is a good time, being as we are at the start of a new year. It’s a word for you to consider. That word is “compelling”.

In marketing and blogging people often throw around the word compelling. It is right up there with “remarkable”. How many of us actually sit down and really think about it?

If you buy a product in the next week, look at your feeds or check out the news stand, ponder for a moment what is driving your actions.

Taking the feeds example have a thought for what made you subscribe, what keeps you subscribed and what could make you leave it?

Compelling could be the difference between a loyal following and being overlooked. Between in demand and take or leave it..

I have been thinking about this, and while I do not have any magic bullet answers and by no means have achieved this wonderful state, I most things can be broadly split into two categories (although to be sure it is probably actually a spectrum).

1. “Must have”, “Essential”, “Compelled to consume”, “In demand”
2. “OK”, “Good”, “Fun”, “Nice”

We want to be number one but I would argue most of us put more effort into and therefore only achieve number two.

It’s one thing to get people to take notice, quite another to keep them engaged. Publicity, advertising, attention-seeking, even “hypnotic techniques”, only serve to capture interest. What happens when people actually consume what you are serving up?

Any product, service or content that achieves “compelling” does this through significant and unique added value. They go way beyond mere useful. There is something crucially valuable that can not be achieved any other way.

I have products I bought that I love and wouldn’t be as happy without. One example is Sky+ which is like a Tivo service for the UK satellite TV service. It means the little television I watch gets automatically recorded and I can view when it suits. Paradoxically the service means I watch far less television but enjoy it far more. I don’t sit watching rubbish waiting for “my show”, and I certainly do not see any advertisements now. What used to be hour long viewing sessions or longer now are shorter than 45mins as the rest is skipped through. The service is compelling, as are only the shows I watch through it.

My feed reading is now similar. While I have 300+ subscriptions the ones I read daily or even weekly are those that I feel I can’t miss. I am compelled to read. Some blogs that I really love are not in there. BoingBoing for example. It’s fantastic. Love it, truly. But I do not subscribe. If I miss a week I haven’t got any sense of loss. Seth Godin’s blog is the same. Every couple of weeks I can catch right up through my web browser.

We have two things to think about here. First, should we be happy to be in “category two”, the “nice to have but take or leaves”? Second, what can we do now that pushes us into the first category, the “can not miss would hate to be withouts”?

One of the stranger aspects of being paid for offering your advice is how much easier it is to see in others the same mistakes you overlook in your own work. Have you noticed that?

On Saturday I was lucky to meet Liz briefly and she gave me some constructive criticism about my blog. The problems mentioned were small but important. Unfortunately to my shame, I had no great nuggets or tips to return, I am going to have to work on that!

I’m so glad it was Liz who pointed out the issue. There really are no excuses for someone who goes around critiquing others to have glaring issues with his own blog are there?

Two phrases spring immediately to mind: “The Cobblers children … ” and “People in glass houses …”. You can see how if you do not follow your own advice how it could make it more difficult for others to accept your “wisdom”.

This makes it doubly important to find friends who tell you like it is. It’s not just your blog success but the authenticity of your message at stake. You need a friendly reminder way before a client points out your lapses. It’s always better to preempt problems rather than apologize for them!

Rather than seeing fellow bloggers in your niche as an enemy or a competitor to trounce, think of them as a potential friend and source of friendly feedback. You can help each other improve and therefore offer a better service to both your audiences.

I was chatting to a couple of bloggers over the weekend and I thought the discussion was divided and interesting enough to open up to you guys.

As we often do we got around to talking about cool sites we have seen recently. I mentioned “Why Digg is Blocked” and almost immediately regretted it. One individual launched into a rant about ad blockers “sucking the life-blood from the internet”

When the dust settled there seemed to be the following positions about the situation, let’s see which you agree with?

1. All ads are evil - Advertising is annoying, distracting, and spoils my enjoyment of the web. I block ads because I don’t like to see them
2. Information should be free - I disagree with people making money from the web. The web was started free and commercialization is ruining it.
3. Ad blockers are selfish - People who block ads are spoiling it for the rest of us. Who is going to pay for their “free” information?

Now my own position is that while some ads really are annoying, especially the ones that take over the page, the noisy flash based ones like the smileys and the bug zapper or the ones that take advantage of non-technical users like the “your computer has a virus” or “10,000 visitor prize”. Having said that I do not block ads because I realize people have to monetize their sites. Yes there is a lot of so-called “free” information but I think there is no such thing, what you might think of as free is actually subsidized by the author, the authors employer or by customers.

Consider this blog. The reason I can post “free” information every day while still putting food on the table and paying my mortgage is because by clients pay me. The information is marketing. My content is my ad. Seth Godin can provide free information in the same way, his content advertises his books. Darren on the other hand makes a large percentage of his income from advertisements. Advertisers pay so you can get his information free.

So do you block ads? Which opinion do you agree with? Is there a position I have missed? Please tick the poll and share your thoughts in the comments?

Why?

“Why?” might be the most important question you can ask.

• Why should someone visit my blog?
• Why would someone buy from me rather than anyone else?
• Why ought someone choose this product?
• Why advertise with me?
• Why do readers like this over that?
• Why am I doing this?
• Why are we in this situation?
• Why will next year be better than this?
• Why are you still reading?

Action is often praised and valued over thinking. There is a lot to be said for taking action. Having said that, what do we learn when we just do?

Especially when we succeed at something we need to understand why. Failing forces us to face our actions, success often lulls us into thinking we luckily and magically do all the right things.

“Why” forces us to look at cause and effect. It focuses our minds not on what we want but what we have to offer.

Try it now. Ask yourself why.

Why will you leave a comment sharing what you think? … or why not?

I am getting a bit annoyed with the Hollywood writers strike. Not at the writers but at what people are saying about them. While I do not know any details about what caused the strike, the popular perception seems to be these writers are over-paid already.

Some are obviously paid very well indeed, I expect 99% are not. People seem to take the headline figure and determine that is what each and every writer in that industry gets 365 days a year. I’m willing to bet that is not the case!

It reminds me of what people have long said about freelance programming, writing, design. “Freelancers have it so good!”. Since I have been involved with freelancers and freelancing it has always been something I have witnessed.  Yes, freelancing can be lucrative, but it isn’t necessarily so.

1. Not all freelancers get the top pay
2. Do not take hourly rates and assume all hours are paid at that rate
3. Most freelancers have time when they are out of work
4. Freelancers don’t get paid vacations or sick time
5. It can take weeks or months for a freelancer to get paid

For every freelancer that is fully booked at their top rate, there are many who are not working at all or working at a much lower hourly rate.

Even when a freelancer does earn their top rate, those good pay days have to compensate for the hours spent doing non-billable work, such as finding the next gig, administration, yada-yada. This is why I refuse to pitch, many companies use “pitching” as a way to get freelancers to work for nothing or provide free consultancy.

One of the advantages that some freelance writers have is the potential to make residuals or royalties. This is why I am willing to get less a word on a book deal than writing a magazine article, for example. In actual fact though those percentages are dwindling or being excluded from new distribution channels, I believe (correct me if I am wrong) this is what the strike is about. Very few of us make the sort of royalties you would get from writing a Harry Potter, in fact most books are not a safe bet at all.

For an employee, it is easy to compare hourly rates and think they are getting a bad deal before they consider all the facts. If you are thinking about freelancing yourself, make sure you think it all the way through first. There are many, many great things about freelance working, but I wouldn’t put “potential to get rich” amongst them!

What is wealth to you? What attitudes do you have towards money? Are you attracted and enthused by the idea of business or are your feelings conflicted or negative?

A couple of people have told me they get uncomfortable talking about money. In fact reading about business or making money makes them feel uncomfortable. It’s understandable though we should not leave unchecked thoughts that hold us back from succeeding.

What we focus on we get more of, so let’s think in ways that help rather than hinder!
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While in previous entries of this series I mentioned how the implementation is more important than the idea, no human endeavor in this world happens without someone first having a brainwave. Look around, how many things that we take for granted were some bright sparks moment of inspiration (often followed by years of perspiration).

Making a success in business is hard. As well as developing marketable ideas, we also have to come up with ideas that continue to inspire us months or years after we decide to take the leap. This is why many of the successes we know about were not entirely motivated by cash. Most of the time the people involved actually believed in what they were doing.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have earning money as a motivation, but that your vision has to be at least as powerful.
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