21st Century Affiliate Marketing

Selling my own designs on CafePress

I have been selling products in my CafePress shop for several years and there are many things I like about it.

I enjoy selling my designs and earning commissions on a regular basis, but I’m not much of a graphic designer and there are many things I like that I don’t have either the time or the talent to create and sell.

Promoting designs created by others on CafePress

At one point, I was doing well with earning commissions through the CafePress affiliate program, but that dropped to almost nothing when they went from a private affiliate program to using Commission Junction.

CafePress changed the pricing model for products sold through their marketplace

Last year, CafePress made some changes and when one of my designs sells in their marketplace, I earn a smaller commission than when the same product with the same design sells in my shop.

Most of my sales in November and December were through the CafePress marketplace, so my earnings were smaller than they would have been if they were made through my shop.

On top of that, I didn’t earn any affiliate commissions.

Getting started with Zazzle

So, I decided today to look into Zazzle and see if it was something I wanted to try.

I have a lot of friends who have either moved from CafePress to Zazzle, or they have shops at both of them.

Getting started with Zazzle is very easy

I set up my account and opened my brand new Zazzle shop today.

There’s not much in it, yet.

Basically, I’ve chosen a theme, entered a bit about me on my profile page, uploaded my standard profile photo, and set up some of the optional stuff for promotions.

Adding designs and products to Zazzle

Now, it’s time to modify some of my best-selling designs and add them to products at Zazzle. That’s going to take some time and will be an ongoing process. My goal is to have most of my best selling designs on both CafePress and Zazzle before October, so they’ll be ready to promote in time for the massive November-December buying season.

I’ll start later this week with one of my best selling designs on CafePress and see what it takes to add it to multiple products on Zazzle. I’m sure there will be differences and I may run into obstacles as a result of my experience with CafePress and being so new to Zazzle. We’ll see if these are serious obstacles or just speed bumps.

Zazzle has their own private affiliate program

in addition to selling my own designs, I’m looking forward to trying their affiliate program and selling designs created by other people that I find and like.

For instance, when browsing through their marketplace, this afternoon, I found a design that cleverly combines two things that speak to me, and possibly to you, with a bit of humor.

I’m a huge Star Trek and Star Wars fan and I was really angry last year with the bailout of banks and financial institutions that were considered too big to fail.

That’s why I laughed when I saw this design:

Death Star: Too Big to Fail by starwars
Browse more Death T-Shirts

A lot of people use the abbreviation, “lol,” to say that they laughed out loud when seeing something. I don’t make a habit of that, but I really did laugh out loud when I saw that design.

I like it better than my own Too Big To Fail design.

The nice thing is, if someone sees this and buys either a product with my design or the more clever death star product then I’ll earn a commission.

I enjoy earning a commission.

Really.

The more, the better!

Even though I don’t have a single product in my Zazzle shop, yet, I can still earn by promoting other people’s designs, and I like that.

When I have products in my shop, then I can benefit from any other Zazzle shop owners who choose to promote my products.

A sale of one of my designs through someone else’s affiliate link slightly reduces my earnings, but that’s more than made up for by their promotional efforts, so I’m happy to share part of the profits with them.

There are significant differences between CafePress and Zazzle

So, I still have a lot to learn about Zazzle, but I’m liking what I’ve seen and learned up to this point.

Another difference between CafePress and Zazzle is that you have to pay for a premium shop on CafePress in order to have multiple designs in your store, but on Zazzle, it’s totally free.

Even though it only costs about $7 per month for a premium shop on CafePress, this ought to appeal to you if you don’t want to pay anything and still have a way to earn money through online marketing.

Discussing Zazzle on Squidoo Marketing

I’ve started a discussion in the Zazzle Group on my Squidoo Marketing community for discussing opening a Zazzle shop, creating designs, adding them to products, and promoting them.

Since I’m a complete newbie on Zazzle, I’ll use myself as a guinea pig and talk about some of the things I do to create the products and market them.

I’m sure I’ll make some mistakes and I may have some ideas you never thought of, so I’m hoping it will be a useful discussion. You can see it here:

I am a newbie to Zazzle - do you have any advice?

That discussion is primarily for people who enjoy using Squidoo to market their products, but we’ll also be discussing other avenues of promotion and sales. You’re welcome to come and join us there, if you want.

In conclusion…

I like what I see so far at Zazzle and I’m looking forward to exercising what they offer and promoting designs I find that were created by other people, too.

I’m looking forward to seeing if I can develop a new, reliable, and growing income stream with Zazzle.

What about you?

Do you have any thoughts about CafePress, Zazzle, or either of their affiliate programs?

Act on your dream!

JD

If you’ve been reading my blogs or sites for any length of time, you know I live in an area where only dial-up Internet access is currently available, and it’s also an area with old, copper phone lines so that means I’ve been connecting at much slower speeds than my equipment is capable of.

This wasn’t much of a problem a few years ago.

Now, however, it has become a much bigger problem, especially for someone who earns his living from online marketing.

For the last week or so, I’ve had access to high-speed broadband and it has made all the difference in how I perceive what I and some of my friends are doing online.

For example, I’m a huge fan of Mitch Mitchell’s I’m Just Sharing blog and Aussie Sire’s Wassup blog.

As much as I enjoy both of their blogs, sometimes it has been frustrating trying to get them to load. Many times, I would have to load a blog post two or three times before the entire page would load.

This week, however, they load the first time, every time and do it quickly. That has made it much easier and more enjoyable to read what they have to say. The same holds true for quite a few other blogs I read on a regular basis.

The benefit to me is that I’m less frustrated and can read more in much less time. That increases my motivation to participate and also decreases the amount of time I spend waiting — and playing solitaire while the pages load. (In fact, I’ve only played two games of solitaire in the last week, and there were many times in the past few years when I would play several games while waiting on one page to load, so that’s a huge difference.)

Broadband makes it much easier to edit my sites

Truthfully, it hasn’t made much of a difference in editing my own blogs and sites, because I tend to do a lot of low-bandwidth things on them and intend to continue with that approach. Still, high-speed broadband opens the door to working with video in the future, especially when promoting local small businesses on Murphy Gold. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time and I’m looking forward to it.

I can view and edit my Squidoo lenses, now

Where it has made a huge difference is being able to once-again edit my Squidoo lenses reliably and easily.

I was having a problem even seeing my own Squidoo lenses the last year or two. Editing them was even more problematic, especially some of the larger lenses such as my Site Build It lens.

The result of my problem with loading the lenses with slow dial-up was that I became more frustrated and less prone to update the lenses when people added sites to the voting Plexo modules.

The benefit of high-speed broadband is that I find it easy to view the lenses and edit them. Now, instead of being frustrated when I receive an email telling me that someone has added something to a Plexo module, I look forward to seeing what it is.

Usually, unfortunately, it’s some lame-brained spammer trying to spam their totally off-topic link on my site, but there are some nuggets in all the mud where people are suggesting excellent sites and lenses that I’m happy to add.

Publishing the lenses is much faster and much more reliable with a fast Internet connection, too.

The result is, over the last week, I’ve updated more lenses than I did in the last several months combined.

I can see my CafePress store much better now

Over the last couple of years, it seems that it has become harder and harder (and much slower) to edit my CafePress store and do all the things that are necessary to keep it up-to-date and to add new designs. As a result, I just stopped updating it.

We all know that makes a great recipe for stagnation, fewer sales, and loss of income. It’s exactly what happened.

Now, however, I can load the store in seconds, as opposed to sometimes taking ten minutes or more for pages with lots of products.

I’ve only tested editing a couple of pages, but I was able to make changes in five minutes or less that would have taken over an hour with my dial-up connection — if it were possible to successfully complete them at all.

A lot of people don’t care for my designs, and that’s okay. The good news is that I’ve sold a lot of products through my CafePress store and look forward to selling lots more. I have over 100 designs that I’ve never added to my store because it just wasn’t worth the time and effort.

I’ll be adding quite a few of them in the coming days and I’ll be promoting my CafePress store much more actively in the future.

In fact, I’ll probably be opening more stores that are focused entirely on a single niche and I’ll be promoting them heavily on several sites.

Will that increase sales? I’m sure it will. I’ll know for sure a year from now.

One of the things I’m sure will increase sales is lowering the prices.

In the past, I’ve used a premium pricing strategy for my CafePress shop. I expected few sales, so I raised the markup I’d receive on each sale.

Now that I have reliable, fast access to editing my shop, again, I’m changing the strategy.

I just lowered the prices on all the products in my store to reflect a moderate pricing strategy. I’ll earn quite a bit less per sale, but I expect that to increase the number of sales.

So, just a few minutes ago, while writing this post, I lowered the prices of every product in my shop, some of them substantially.

A fast broadband connection even makes Site Build It better

I intentionally design both of my sites that are powered by Site Build It to be low-bandwidth friendly.

I want people with slow connections to be able to read what I write and I want those pages to snap on the screen for people with faster connections.

I’m not going to make many changes in that regard, with the exception of adding a few videos.

I’ve known for some time that the popularity of video on the web has been exploding, but it was a waste of time and effort to even try to view them with my slow connection. This week, however, I’ve found how easy it is to watch video in real time with a fast connection and I know that video is more interesting to lots of people than pure text.

I still remain a text-oriented person, but I recognize an opportunity when I see it.

Another very interesting thing occurred to me this week. For all the years that I’ve been a Site Build It subscriber, I’ve always read the Action Guide and never even tried to view the video version of it.

That changed this week. For the first time ever, I watched the entire video version of the Action Guide and I have to admit that hearing someone speak while watching animation that was used to illustrate some of the processes really did make some of it more understandable. In fact, I’m going to watch the Days 2 and 3 videos again this evening.

Even though I have a good understanding of the three-tier structure of a successful website, the new tier-structure video made it much more understandable and I’ll be implementing some changes to both of my SBI sites over the coming days, as a result.

A fast connection doesn’t lessen the work, but it does make my efforts more efficient

I don’t know of anything that is reliable and honest that reduces the amount of work that it takes to be a successful online marketer, but I do know that a fast broadband connection makes a world of difference in improving efficiency.

Of course, that makes sense, but it has been a real eye-opener for me.

Back when I was a Systems Administrator for a local ISP I had direct access to a fast broadband pipe and it was nice, but that was before so many sites relied upon javascript, java, audio, video, and other things that benefit from high-speed pipes.

So, I was able to do just about anything I needed to do from home on dial-up almost as efficiently as I could do from the office using broadband.

But, that was a decade ago and things have changed drastically.

Now, there is a world of difference between slow dial-up access and high-speed broadband. That difference is much bigger and more important than I realized, and it is a very important difference for anyone aspiring to make money online from affiliate marketing or just about any other form of marketing.

Now, I’m wondering what other things I’m going to discover that will make my online marketing more effective.

What about you?

Do you have any thoughts or opinions about the differences between slow and fast Internet connections and the effectiveness of your online affiliate marketing efforts?

I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts.

Act on your dream!

JD

I enjoy blogging and I’ve been doing this for a long time, back before the words weblog and blog were even coined.

This is the last year where blogging will be part of my marketing plan, however.

The plain truth is that blogging hasn’t been worth the time and effort in terms of receiving an income from all I’ve done. So, since I’m going to be concentrating on increasing my revenue next year, I’m going to focus almost entirely on what works for me and I’m dropping what hasn’t been fruitful.

There is a good chance that this blog won’t be here a year from now.

I’m turning my attention back to what does work for me - what pays the bills - and another thing I enjoy, which is building static, hierarchical websites focused on particular topics.

I’ve been building websites since shortly after the introduction of the world wide web and I have used lots of different tools to build sites that attract visitors and earn money from sponsorships, advertising, affiliate sales, and in other ways.

One site, that I’ve sadly neglected because of health issues that have interfered, still earns more in one month than all my blogs earn in an entire year — and I haven’t done much to that site at all in the last year.

That should be a lesson to me. Concentrate on what’s working and stop playing with all the shiny red balls that bounce by.

I enjoy blogging

I enjoy blogging and the social aspects of commenting on other blogs. These discussions have been fun and I’ve met some great people around the world as a result.

But, let’s face it. We talk to each other, but we don’t buy from each other. You don’t buy from me and I don’t buy from you. That’s the bottom line when it comes to a marketing business.

I’m still going to follow blogs and bloggers that I like and I’ll still have something to say now and then when Mitch or AussieSire, or several others I enjoy reading, writes something of interest, but I’m not going to spend nearly the time and effort that I have in the past on my own blogs.

I don’t like being poor

My goal in having an online marketing business is to earn a good living at it, not just barely get by.

This has been an unusually hard year for me, but that’s the way life happens. I’m hoping that it was just the bottom of a bad cycle and that things will start moving upwards, soon.

That’s another reason to concentrate on what’s working.

The majority of my income this year has been from a brand new site I started back in July when I had to replace the affiliate income I lost.

I’ve been playing around with promoting my adopted home town and the people and organizations here, but I turned that into a business this year when I launched Murphy Gold and its companion social networking site at Murphy Connections.

This is a more-traditional business structure.

Local business owners pay me to promote them and I write about the products and services they offer and other things they do throughout the year, such as special events.

Over time, even in a small town like Murphy, NC, this can be profitable.

Now that I have all the infrastructure in place, it’s time to hunker down and focus on that.

So, you’ll see less of me here. I’ll still drop in on your blogs now and then and I’m following some of them in email and RSS, but I won’t be saying much, unless you write something that really captures my interest and I think my comment may add value to what you’re saying.

This answers my question: WordPress or SBI?

I can clearly show on my profit and loss statement that SBI delivers much more income and more visitors who actually buy something than all of my blogs put together.

SBI takes less work, doesn’t have to be updated every time I turn around, and now with Content 2 being available to all of us who power our sites with Site Build It, it gives me an easy way to let others write pages for the site and comment on them.

That adds the social aspect to SBI sites that I’ve enjoyed on blogs.

So, there you have it.

I’ve been promoting SBI for years and telling you how much I love it, so I’m going to go back to using it and rebuilding my online marketing business.

Blogging has been a fun experiment.

Act on your dream!

JD

If you’ve been reading this blog this year, you know that I was caught by the new tax laws that were passed in North Carolina back in July. As a result, I was dropped by several large merchants as an affiliate, including Amazon.com where I had been an affiliate for over a decade.

That hurt, but it also meant that I had to rebuild several large sites and remove all the links. I still have not finished that process.

It also meant that I lost all the monetization for one of my sites and I’ve been looking for a way to replace the income I lost.

I got some good news this week and think I may see some light at the end of the tunnel.

ShopZilla approved me as an affiliate and I can use it similarly to what I used to do with Amazon.com.

The main difference is that ShopZilla is a shopping comparison site and links, especially search results links, offer a variety of choices where you can buy and at what price.

I won’t have time to work on this until January, but I’m looking forward to giving it a try.

What about you?

Do you have any experience with ShopZilla?

Act on your dream!

JD

I originally wrote this in July, 2007 on another of my blogs. That was back when my affiliate marketing business was growing and I was happy with the direction I was going.

Some of these points are just as valid today as they were then.

I have learned several lessons that I think may be valuable to anyone who reads this. You may agree or disagree, but at least give it some thought.

1. Anything that is a good value today will be a good value a year from now.

2. The more the hype, the less the value or longevity.

3. If it has a deadline, run away, don’t walk, run - in a zig-zag pattern.

4. Don’t send your valuable prospect away on first contact. Try to get their contact information so you can follow-up - yes, build your list. (I wish I’d done more of this.)

5. If you can’t understand the compensation plan after reading it twice, you may never understand it, so maybe it is best to avoid it.

6. Always try to get residual income rather than one-off commissions.

7. Try to get life-time customers.

8. If more than five people email you about something the same day, avoid it.

9. Spillover is a myth. It may happen now and then, but don’t depend upon it.

10. Earning money - no matter how you do it - is work. It takes longer than you think and it takes more creativity and effort. Nobody will do your work for you.

11. Don’t spend more than you can afford. Define your budget and stick with it. If your outgo exceeds your income, your upkeep will be your downfall.

12. Don’t go into debt to try to make more money. Pour a percentage of your revenue back into tools and marketing. As a result of this, I’m spending more on marketing every month than I made the first two years of online marketing. But, it’s all a percentage of income. I have no debt and I intend to keep it that way.

13. It takes a long time to start earning money with online marketing (unless you are very lucky or very good at what you do). It took months for me to earn my first commission check, and several more months before I got my second one. Now, I get checks from several companies every month. It did not happen overnight, but it can be done with perseverance, even if you make a lot of mistakes along the way.

14. Don’t pay attention to how much money someone is claiming to earn. There is a huge difference between gross and net.

15. Help others grow and advance, don’t take advantage of them just to get their money.

When I originally wrote this, I was doing a lot of testing with traffic exchanges and downline builders. I was actively promoting two MLM companies. Today, I’m doing none of those things.

So, the comments about spillover really have nothing to do with affiliate marketing, because they’re more appropriate to anyone involved in network marketing. I got so tired of getting emails telling me that some “big-hitter” was going to start promoting to his “massive” list and there was only so much time to get involved in his program if we wanted any spillover. To the best of my recollection, from testing several different programs, I think I received half a dozen people in my downline from spillover and never made a penny from it.

In every case, I lost money in the process. That’s why I no longer do any of that.

In regards to #14, it’s not just a difference between gross and net. Some people will actually lie to you! (Surprise!) Anyone with a graphics program can dummy an income statement.

I’m not saying that all of them are dummies or lies, but I know that some of them are. Don’t believe everything you read or see. Caveat emptor.

What do you think?

Agree? Disagree? Let’s talk.

Act on your dream!

JD

I hope the subject of this post didn’t mislead you. If it did, I apologize right now.

I just didn’t have room to ask the real question I’m pondering this morning…

How much do you have to earn from something in order for it to be worth the effort?

That’s closer to what I’m thinking about.

My goal for my online marketing has always been to clear $100 per day for my efforts.

Since I don’t use pay per click advertising, and I no longer have upgraded memberships in the traffic exchanges (or even use them anymore), and I don’t use paid classifieds any longer, my only overhead is hosting, domain names, and a few services that are ancillary to what I’m doing.

So, it would seem that being able to clear $100 per day would not be too difficult. All I’d have to earn is about $110 per day and the goal would be met.

Still, it just isn’t working out that way.

I used to think the plan to follow would be to have 100 sites each earning a dollar a day. It sounds simple, but it never worked. Some of those sites were lucky to earn a dollar a month.

As much as I like the concept of having many little revenue streams that add up to one large revenue river, the reality has never lived up to the idea.

A couple of years ago, I thought I was well on the way, but things took a detour, as you already know, and I’m trending downward.

There are some reasons for that, I know.

1. I was earning profits by recommending the traffic exchanges and a couple of MLM programs. However, over time, I realized that this was just a treadmill and I was getting nowhere fast.

2. I was making a profit by recommending books and other products through Amazon.com, but they dropped me when the NC legislature passed the tax law this summer.

3. I was making a profit by recommending some ebooks that I used to think were valuable, but no longer think so, so I stopped recommending them.

4. I was earning money from Squidoo from publishing lenses, but that has been declining and I just earned the lowest amount I’ve ever earned from them for a month - just over $2.00.

5. I was earning nice checks from Cafepress.com for the designs I’ve uploaded, but that has declined since they started setting the prices they’d charge in the marketplace. Now, most of my sales are through the marketplace and, instead of earning $7 or $8 per sale, I’m earning closer to $2.50. I’m making more sales, but earning less money.

6. One thing that is really holding up for me, even though it’s still down from what I saw the last couple of years, is earnings from recommending Site Build It. The residuals for annual renewals are doing very well, but the new sales have declined quite a bit. Lately, I’ve been doing more work on planning what I’m going to do on my SBI-powered sites than I have been in promoting the service. But, I believe that it is a long-term strategy that will lead to increased profits in the long-run.

7. Google Adsense income has continued to do pretty well, even though it, too, is down from what I used to earn. Part of the reason is that I’ve removed it from some of my popular sites. I’m starting to reconsider that move and I may be adding Adsense ads back to some of my sites where I previously removed them.

So, those are some of the things I’ve been thinking about.

Then, over my first cup of coffee, I asked myself, “How much do I have to earn from something in order for it to be worth the effort?”

Now, I’m asking you that question, too.

If you promote something and it earns only a few dollars per month, or per year, is it better to just let it ride, because something is better than nothing?

If you think that is true, would you do the same thing in real life?

In other words, would you take a job that just pays $10 per month, rather than one that pays that much - or more - per hour?

If you would not, why would you settle for earning that much from a program online?

Let’s say that you’re earning $100 per month from a program, but you work 20 hours or more, per month, to keep it going. Is that worth it?

What if it only took a couple of hours to earn that $100? Would that be worth it?

Now, this is where you’d probably expect me to recommend something and pitch you on why you should buy it to help you earn more.

I’m not going to do that.

I’m seriously interested in your opinions and hope you’ll comment with your expectations, observations, and evaluations of what you’re doing and how well it’s going.

If I were still depending upon earning a living from affiliate marketing this year, I’d be nothing but skin and bones and living in a culvert or under a bridge somewhere.

I’m still earning a living from my online marketing efforts, but it’s mostly from helping local business owners in Murphy, NC promote their brick and mortar businesses online. I’m not earning what I want to earn, but at least it seems to be growing a little.

So, what’s your opinion?

How much do you have to earn from something for it to be worth your effort?

Act on your dream!

JD

I have been an affiliate with Art.com for several years and it has been a company I have enjoyed working with and earning from.

See their site: ART PRINTS - Art.com!

At one time, when I had a number of special interest “art stores” on JohnDilbeck.com, I was earning some nice commission checks and some were upwards of $200 for a month’s sales.

Right about now is a good time to promote art, posters, photographs, tapestries, and other things that are available at Art.com.

The holiday buying season is upon us and Art.com offers nice commissions on sales, especially for framed prints.

With everyone looking for great gifts, there is a very good chance that you’ll find something that fits your niche in the 100,000 items they sell.

In addition to good commissions on direct sales from your links, Art.com has a two-tier affiliate program and you can earn commissions from websites recruited from your links.

To sign up for their affiliate program, click the following button:

As an affiliate, you will be able to build lots of different links to individual products, live-store windows, virtual stores, banners and logos, search boxes, and text links.

AllPosters.com

Art.com and AllPosters.com are two brands for the same company. Each brand has a separate affiliate program and it may make sense to sign up for either or both brands, depending upon your niche and the market you reach.

As an affiliate, you can link to any page on the AllPosters.com site. For example, the following is a link to their home page:

Buy Posters at AllPosters.com

Of course, I would earn a commission from anyone who clicks on that link and makes a purchase. After all, that’s what affiliate marketing is all about, right?

They have about a half-million products that you can market and they’ve been in operation since 1995.

AllPosters.com, too, has a two-tier affiliate program.

The AllPosters.com Affiliates Program is a great way to make money with your website. Link to AllPosters.com and earn 20% of every purchase made by your site visitors at their website. If the visitor decides to purchase within 10 days of their last visit from your website, you’ll still earn commission on the sale!

You can link to AllPosters.com from a selection of over hundreds of thousands poster and art print images as well as poster stores and mini stores.

They have posters related to just about everything (e.g. movies, music, sports, art, animals) so no matter what the content of your site is, you will find images that are a good fit. It’s easy to sign-up, track your sales, and build links because the site generates all the HTML code for you.

Sign up today!

Both of these sites are great sources for revenue, if you reach people who are…

… interested in decorating their homes

… college students and young adults

… looking for great gifts to give.

What about you?

Are you an affiliate with Art.com and/or AllPosters.com? If so, what has been your experience with their products and affiliate programs?

Act on your dream!

JD

I was reading several blogs and forums where people were talking about how much money they earned (or didn’t earn) from affiliate marketing in October.

The more I read, the more I realized that I’m not doing as badly as I have been feeling.

After all, I earned a living from this for quite a few years, and, even if my income has dropped quite a bit over the last year, I’m still earning more than many people are.

Now, I know that sounds selfish and I hope each of you has greater success with your affiliate marketing efforts in 2010 than you’ve had in 2009.

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been reading about many people who are working hard to earn something and still haven’t made any money at all. I can remember how frustrating that is. When you’re doing everything you know how to do and it isn’t producing any results, it can be a very difficult and disheartening experience.

I remember how happy I was to get that first commission check from Amazon.com quite a few years ago. Over the years, I’ve received checks from a number of companies and I still get a thrill when I endorse and deposit them.

Although they aren’t coming nearly as frequently as they used to, a few are still arriving and I’m thankful for each of them.

I’m wondering now if I’ve lost my way with affiliate marketing. At one time, I worked hard to send people to Amazon.com and looked forward to commissions from them. It was fun finding products and telling my readers about them.

Those were products that real people were interested in.

When I say “real people,” I’m talking about folks who aren’t interested in affiliate marketing. They were people who saw a link to something that interested them and they purchased it. Sometimes they purchased several things totally unrelated to what I was writing about and I earned a commission on each of those sales.

Now that Amazon.com dropped me after NC passed the new tax law this summer, I’m wondering if there is another company that would be a good substitute. I still love recommending books and some other consumer products, but don’t know of a good company with which I can work.

Do you have any suggestions?

As those of us in the United States get closer to our annual Thanksgiving Day holiday, I’ve been looking at things from a different perspective.

I think I’m over being stressed out about all the things that have gone wrong in the last year or so and I’m starting to focus more on what can go right over the coming year. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to hang on this year and now I’m setting my sites once again on prosperity instead of mere survival.

A year from now, I expect to be in much better financial shape than I am today, and to get there I’m going to have to create a new plan and work hard to achieve it.

One of the things I’ve identified is that this blog is not an income producer. Lots of people read it, but few purchase anything. Most of my sales come from sites that have absolutely nothing to do with making money online.

Years ago, I was advised by someone who knows a lot about online marketing and he said then, and it is even more true now, that the world doesn’t need any more websites and blogs about making money online, especially when the people building those sites are not very successful themselves.

I’ve talked about being interested in too many things for my own good, and not being specifically interested in a few things I could build a site around.

My brother, before he became disabled, loved drag racing. It was a life-long love and a few years ago I started building Georgia Drag Racing for him. He was working to write a book about the golden years of drag racing in the Atlanta area and was making great progress before he got to the point where it hurt too much to sit at a computer for very long.

So, that site has seen its best days and will be declining over time as less content is created. Still, surprisingly, it remains one of my best-earning websites, even though it has many links to Amazon.com that aren’t earning me anything and which I haven’t had the time or energy to remove.

It’s not at all about earning money online and I think that’s the key to its success. It attracts people who enjoy drag racing and they’re willing to spend money on their hobby.

I’ve watched as others have done the same thing. I know of people who have built successful, money-earning websites based on such diverse topics as dealing with insurance problems, telling Halloween and ghost stories, juggling, repairing computers, kitchen counter tops, organic gardening, hydroponic gardening, modeling advice, and dozens of other niche subjects that interested them and which they built into sites that produce a substantial annual income.

I have been trying to find a niche for myself in which I could do the same thing, but so far I haven’t found it.

At least, now, I know all the things I will need to do to build and publicize such a site if I can ever identify a topic that I can love and be willing to write about every day.

I’ve come close to such a niche, but it is not really what I’m talking about.

I love living in the mountains of Murphy, NC and I love the people, scenery, and pace of life here. I’ve been promoting the area and a few businesses off and on over the years and this year I’ve been concentrating on building Murphy Connections, a social networking site, and Murphy Gold, a site for promoting a few locally-owned, small businesses that are located in the Murphy NC 28906 ZIP code.

I’m starting to have some success with those sites and look forward to spending a lot of time working on, and improving, them over the coming months.

Another site that I enjoy, but whose earnings have dropped dramatically since I removed all the Amazon links is my Act On Your Dream! site.

Basically, I lost focus on that site, but I’ve been brainstorming a lot of ideas and now have a plan for updating that site on a regular basis. Now that Sitesell has made Content 2.0 free for all SBI sites, I’ll be adding more interactive features to it over time. In fact, I think that I’ll be blogging less as a result.

In fact, I’m going to be taking some of what I’ve written in my blogs and repurposing it on that site to see how it works.

Even though I’ve just gone through the worst 12 months of my life, I still believe that we can achieve what we want if we identify our goals, make good plans to accomplish them, and then put in the required work to make it happen. In as little as a year from now, we can make big changes in our lives.

I’m going to be acting on that belief.

What about you?

What do you think?

Is affiliate marketing working well for you?

Have you identified niches that are good income earners?

What company do you recommend as a substitute for Amazon.com?

I welcome your comments and look forward to discussing them.

Act on your dream!

JD

Yesterday, October 5, 2009, the FTC published their final guidelines governing endorsements and testimonials. This ruling will affect celebrities, bloggers, testimonial advertisements, and probably more.

The press release is here:

FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials

The actual guidelines are in a pdf file that I have tried to download several times, but, so far, have only been able to get a portion of it.

The actual guidelines are described as:

16 C.F.R. Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising: Notice Announcing Adoption of Revised Guides

They are available as a pdf file:

Text of the Federal Register notice

As I said, previously, I have not been able to read these new rules, yet, so I’m just wondering out loud at the moment.

How does this affect affiliate marketers?

Are blog posts with affiliate links covered under these new guidelines? How?

(Disclaimer: I am not now or ever have been a lawyer. I do not give legal advice. I don’t even play a lawyer on TV or the Internet.)

I can read from the press release that anyone who is posting sponsored articles to their blog will be affected. Since I don’t do that, I haven’t given the ramifications much thought.

I almost never receive a freebie in return for writing a review, but I have no problem disclosing that fact when it happens.

Most of us would never fall under the label of “celebrity” and never get paid huge sums of money to endorse a product on a talk show or in social media, but if you do, now you have to disclose that fact.

Still, how does this affect bloggers who are affiliate marketers?

Does every link have to be disclosed as a possible money-making link?

Will it be enough to add a few lines to our disclosures page?

Are we even covered by the new guidelines?

What about you?

Will these new FTC guidelines affect how you run your business and how you advertise and market products and services?

Act on your dream!

JD

For the last few weeks, I admit that I’ve been feeling sorry for myself because I’ve had to face so many obstacles and make so many changes in my marketing business.

All of that comes to an end right now.

No more.

It’s time to face the obstacles, set new goals, evaluate new products, and start promoting again.

I got to thinking about that when I read the address that President Obama will give to students tomorrow. I wrote about it on my John Dilbeck and Friends blog: President Obama’s Speech to Students.

Even though I’m still confronting a lot of conflicting feelings and thoughts about affiliate marketing — and marketing in general — it’s time to look for the positive aspects and not concentrate so much on things I don’t like about it.

I’ve resolved not to do the things I don’t like, so now it’s time to resolve to do the things I do like and enjoy.

So, you can look forward to me talking much more about affiliate marketing programs and products I like and much, much less about the struggles to overcome obstacles.

I really do love affiliate marketing and look forward to getting back into it with a much more positive attitude.

Act on your dream!

JD

For years, I’ve loved affiliate marketing, but lately it has felt more like a chore than a passion and I regret that.

It seems that I find more that I don’t like about it than I love about it, at least lately.

I have been recommending products and services for several years and always felt that I was suggesting something of real value to my readers. Now, I’m not so sure.

Over the last few months, I’ve stopped everything related to “recruitment marketing.” I don’t know if there is a better name for this, but that’s how I’ve come to think about it.

For several years, I was a real fan of SFI Marketing Group and Cognigen Systems. Since both of them are MLM companies, part of the job is to recruit other affiliates and help them. One of my favorite ways to recruit new affiliates was by using the various traffic exchanges and downline builder programs.

Now, after years of this, I no longer do it. I still feel like I was giving my best recommendations and advice based on what I knew at the time, but I’ve learned a lot since then and my interests and circumstances have changed, too.

While I no longer recommend traffic exchanges, I remain a member at several, mainly because I’ve gotten to know the owners over time and I like them. I think they are genuinely doing their best to help their members, but I think that the traffic exchanges themselves are not a good way to introduce yourself and your services to people who really want to work to build their own marketing business.

After having recruited thousands of affiliates, I cannot say that I can name a single success out of the bunch. That doesn’t mean that some of them have not branched out into their own niche and become successful. I don’t know if they have or not, but I know that it was a colossal waste of time for myself and well over 90% of the people who signed up from one of my links.

Instead of trying to help others who are mostly non-responsive, I’m turning my attention to promoting a few services and products that I know are truly helpful for people who are ready to make use of them, and that they are the best of brand in their respective niches.

I’m very happy to continue to recommend Site Build It and Aweber to anyone who is serious about building an online marketing business. I’m a happy customer of both services and expect to be for years to come.

However, I’ve come to realize that both of these services are only going to appeal to a small minority of people who are seriously ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work. Both take a lot of time and work to understand, and even more to put to their best use.

Work and dedication seem to be anathema to most people who dream of having a home business. Instead, they want something automatic that floods their inboxes with money. I have yet to find such a system and I don’t think one exists, yet there are plenty of people who are willing to lie to you and sell you one, anyway.

Yes, both Site Build It and Aweber are systems, but they are tools and training that you have to put to work, not some kind of “push button success machine.” You have to invest the time in learning how to use what they offer and then follow their systems and adapt them to your own personal interests.

This takes work, money, and time.

Since being dropped by Amazon.com and several others this summer (just because I live in North Carolina), I’ve spent a lot of effort undoing years of work. While doing that, I also stopped promoting a lot of other things I promoted in the past.

I wrote about this here: Making progress by going backwards

Now, I find that I am less motivated to do all the things I used to love about affiliate marketing, such as finding and researching new products and services, reviewing them to see if I thought they had real value, and then building websites and blogs to promote them. These days, I find it increasingly difficult to even write about something I really think is a good value for some people, such as the current Site Build It Back to Work special.

I don’t know if I’ve learned some important lessons or if I’ve become disenchanted with affiliate marketing — something I never expected to happen.

I’m also wondering if I can ever recover my former affiliate marketing income just by promoting two services I really believe in. I don’t think that’s possible, and I think that I’ll lose you as a reader if all you ever hear me talk about is Site Build It and Aweber.

Those are not the only tools I use in my business. I have sites hosted by HostGator and I’m one of their affiliates, but I just don’t want to promote them. They offer a great service and I’m happy with their quality. In fact, this blog is hosted on one of their servers. Still, I just don’t want to promote them, when I compare them to Site Build It, which offers a much different set of tools, but has a system that I believe offers my readers a much higher chance of success than what they can get from traditional hosting services.

The same goes for Aweber. I’m an affiliate for several of their competitors, but after testing all of them, the only one I would use for myself is Aweber and I don’t see any reason to promote anything that isn’t the best.

So, I’m wondering if I still have a future in affiliate marketing, or if this is just some kind of phase I have to work through.

There are some excellent ebooks out there that I can recommend, but now I consider most of them to be overpriced and increasingly out of date. What they taught may have worked several years ago, but I don’t think it will now. So, I don’t promote them.

I’m hoping that I’m just going through a reassessment phase and that I’ll rediscover the love I once had for affiliate marketing. I don’t know if that’s going to happen or not.

What about you?

How do you feel about affiliate marketing these days?

What are your favorite affiliate marketing programs and merchants, and why?

I’m looking forward to reading your comments.

Act on your dream!

JD

The last six weeks have seen a very interesting change in my affiliate marketing strategy — well, interesting to me and possibly to you.

Part of this was not part of my ongoing plan — getting canceled by Amazon.com, for instance.

Part of it was finally having time to update some websites that had been neglected for most of the last two years as more and more of my time was devoted to caring for Mom and then working on settling her estate.

Part of it was reevaluating products and services that I’ve recommended over the last few years and deleting links to many of them. While I still feel that almost all of them were good products and worth what they cost, I’m no longer comfortable recommending them.

And, if I’m no longer comfortable doing it, why should I continue?

So, I spent a lot of time this morning removing and redirecting affiliate links for a variety of products.

I’ve been working day and night undoing what I spent years doing — finding and linking to affiliated products on a variety of websites, blogs, Squidoo lenses, and other places on the web. I don’t know how long it will take to find and delete all of them, or if that’s even possible, but I’m working on it diligently.

So far, I’ve deleted nearly a thousand pages on my various sites and at least that part is done.

Progress is not a continuous upwards curve

No matter how much we would like to have continuous, unbroken progress in our businesses, it just doesn’t happen that way.

There are always downturns, obstacles that must be overcome, and changes that must be dealt with.

Yes, it feels like that takes us away from getting our work done, but the truth is that it IS our work.

So, even though I’ve been undoing a lot lately, I feel like I’m finally making some progress by clearing out the old chaff so I can concentrate on growing new wheat.

(No, I’m not a farmer. That’s a metaphor.)

It’s a strange idea, possibly, but I really feel like I’m making progress even though most of what I’ve been doing has been going backwards.

On the positive side, my new website for promoting select locally-owned brick and mortar businesses in Murphy, NC is doing well and I’ll be devoting more and more time to building and promoting Murphy Gold over the coming months.

What part will affiliate marketing play in my future?

More and more, I’m asking myself that question, and I’m unsure of the answer.

As I get pickier about what I recommend to you and have to deal with unexpected things like changes in the NC tax code that got me dropped from several affiliate programs, I find it harder and harder to recommend products and services to you.

Of course, I’ll continue to recommend Site Build It! and I’ll continue using it for my new static sites. At this time, I don’t have any plans to create any new sites and may still decide to delete a few more, but the new sites I build will be powered by SBI.

What do you think?

Those are some of my thoughts about online marketing on a hot summer afternoon.

What do you think? How’s your affiliate marketing business progressing — or not?

Act on your dream!

JD

For the last several months, I’ve been researching information to help me build a new website that will be found in the search engine results.

Choosing keywords is more of an art than a science, despite what some people say about it. It’s not enough to write pages on a site using topics related to the most searched keywords or the most used keywords.

If it were that simple, then we’d all buy a list of the top 1000 keywords and write pages around them.

If you’re new to keyword research, you may have used one of the online keyword research tools that provides a list of phrases that people have searched for lately. With some of them, you enter a word or phrase, and a few seconds later you get a list of related phrases that contain the words you entered along with other words.

For example, this morning I was doing some research on what people were really using when trying to find a place to eat. I’m promoting a local family-style restaurant, but could not find good keywords to attract visitors. So, I did some vertical research on words like eating, eat, food, restaurant, dining, and a few others. Over a couple of hours, I looked at a couple of thousand long tail keyword phrases that contained one or more of those words. None of them had the numbers I was looking for, however.

Later, I did a lateral search for keywords related to restaurants. This produced several hundred keywords that were found on the top-ranked pages about restaurants in Google, but which did not contain the word, “restaurant.”

After that, I researched the word, “dining,” but most of the good-ranking phrases were related to furniture, not restaurants.

So, that’s the challenge. I need to find what real people are searching for when they want to find a good place to eat. I’ll keep working on it.

Finding the right keywords

Earlier, I mentioned that lots of people look for the most searched keywords and use them when writing their pages.

That’s an important consideration, but it overlooks something equally, or possibly more, important — how many other people are doing the same thing. In other words, what’s your competition?

About a decade ago, Ken Evoy wrote an ebook called Make Your Site Sell!, where he talked a lot about being found by the search engines. He was the first author I found who talked about both supply and demand when it came to keyword research.

By writing about topics in the top searched keywords, we are doing part of it right. We’re writing about things that have a high demand — people searching for them on the search engines.

But, what about all the other people who are doing the same thing? How many other pages are there that are competing with you for those search engine results?

I don’t know about you, but I want to find just the right combination of words that have a high demand and a low supply. Then I’ll invest the time and effort to write about them.

If you have a choice of two phrases with approximately equal demand, but one has ten times the number of competitors as the other, which one would you choose to write about?

I’d choose the one with the least number of competitors — most of the time. Now and then, I write about something that I know I probably won’t rank highly for, just because I want to write about it.

I do basic keyword research, but don’t get bogged down in all the SEO (search engine optimization) discussions and postulating. I don’t have time or energy to waste trying to guess the exact keyword density Google wants. Page rank discussions leave me bored to tears.

What I want is a tool that helps me find the right keywords and then get on with my life.

This morning, I got a very pleasant surprise.

Sitesell introduced version 3 of their Brainstorm It! tool

Now, if you’ve been reading along lately, you know that I’m building a new site for promoting local brick-and-mortar businesses and the site is powered by Site Build It!, the main product offered by Sitesell.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been using the beta version of Brainstorm It! 3, but the actual current version was 2.2.

This morning, without thinking, before my first cup of coffee, I logged into Site Central and clicked the Brainstorming link.

I was pleasantly surprised to see version 3 load in my browser. As late as last evening, I had to go to the beta address to use version 3, but this morning, it’s the standard version.

I logged into the Sitesell members-only forums and found the announcement by Ken Evoy that the new version had been successfully deployed overnight.

Not only does version 3 produce better results, it’s much, much faster than version 2, even on the slow dial-up connection I have.

Everything is working as expected. All the hundreds of top-ranking keyword phrases I had in my Master Keyword List (MKL) were there. The changeover was painless and I didn’t have to do anything at all.

So, how much is the price of Site Build It! going up because of this new tool? Not one penny. We continue to get more and more functionality with SBI at the same price. You gotta love that.

Currently I have about 600 keywords in my MKL that have a relatively high demand and low supply. Over time, I’ll keep on researching, comparing, and pruning this list to make sure that I’ll spend my time well, writing about topics that Google may rank highly.

Although it isn’t perfect, and I have to use my own intelligence and intuition when comparing which long tail keyword phrases to use, the new version three of Brainstorm It! is already a very nice tool in my Internet marketing arsenal.

Of course, it comes at no extra charge with a Site Build It! subscription.

It almost makes keyword research fun.

Act on your dream!

JD

It’s been a busy week around here.

In addition to working to bring a new site online (that won’t have any affiliate ads and very few Adsense ads), I’ve been busy rebuilding one of my oldest websites, JohnDilbeck.com.

That’s the site where I really started to learn affiliate marketing and online marketing, in general. It’s where I sold my steel roses and started making real money with Amazon.com.

Sadly, however, it had suffered years of neglect and looked like an abandoned flower garden that once was beautiful, but eventually became clogged with weeds and overgrown bushes.

I’ve been intending to rebuild JohnDilbeck.com for some time, but — at over 1,500 pages — the task was daunting and I never seemed to find the time to tackle it.

Over the years, I’ve tested lots of things on that site, and some of the pages looked horrible, when I looked at them with fresh eyes.

Mitch and I talked about that on a previous post where we were talking about Site Build It and I mentioned JohnDilbeck.com as an example of a site that more than earned its way. He mistakenly thought it was powered by SBI, but it isn’t. It’s just a standard Linux-hosted static website. Most pages are plain HTML, but a few are PHP so I can do some things that could not be done on a standard HTML page.

Well over 600 pages of the site were built specifically to bring in Amazon.com commissions. Now that Amazon has terminated my association because I live in North Carolina, I didn’t want to be sending anyone their way at my expense with no hope of generating any revenue from it.

That was the incentive to tackle the project.

Fortunately, I build my large static sites using a programmable database, and each major section has a template through which I process each page. That means that it’s probably easier than it sounds at first. Still it was a big task.

Part of the task was made easier when I would look at a major section and decide that it just wasn’t worth updating everything. As a result, instead of rebuilding hundreds of pages, I deleted them.

This will probably play havoc with my rankings in the search engines, but it will probably be easier on anyone who happens to visit the site.

I had Amazon.com ads on just about every page on the site, and now I think there are none, or only a few. There may still be pages where I recommended a specific book using a text link.

Eventually, I want to get back to that site and try to build it back to its former place of importance in my marketing efforts.

At least, now, it’s prettier and maybe easier to use.

I’m prejudiced, because I love that site. I don’t think I can really see it with fresh eyes after editing it for about 10 years.

I lost a lot of good information in the process, and killed what was one of my longest-running blogs. I did save lots of information in the database, so some of the information I didn’t have time to update now may make its way back onto the site in the future.

We’ll see.

So, that’s one site (mostly) cleaned up, and many more to go.

Sigh.

Act on your dream!

JD

What next?

The NYAffiliateVoice blog has an article about several companies terminating affiliates in Hawaii and Rhode Island.

Termination of Hawaii Affiliates Continue

I wonder how many hundreds of affiliate marketing businesses - both full-time and part-time - are being destroyed by these tax law changes.

(Sigh.)

Act on your dream!

JD