That was not my last post to 21st Century Affiliate Marketing

August 20, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 9 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Facebook, John Dilbeck, Musings 

Surprise! I’m back. (grin)

Apparently, the reports of my death were greatly exaggerated, and it looks like that applies to this blog, too.

I came close to dying back in March, and things weren’t looking too good in May, either.

I’m happy to tell you that I’m getting better. I have a long way to go before I’m fully recovered, but I’m making substantial progress.

I wrote what I thought would be the last post to this blog in the middle of May, 2010. Since then, there have been some significant events in my life.

On April 1, 2010, my friend and surgeon resected my intestines, removed my gall bladder, and removed an 8-lb colon cancer. He was surprised to find the tumor in one large contained mass, rather than spread throughout my abdomen. That was a very lucky break.

Other, relatively minor surgeries followed.

A PET scan showed that I had suspicious spots in both thyroid glands and in the right lobe of my liver.

A biopsy of each thryoid gland showed that the growths were benign, not cancer. Happy dance!

A biopsy of the tumor in my liver showed it was benign. Happy dance!

However, a radiologist on the oncology team that would be doing the procedure on my liver called me at home from his vacation and said the biopsy report on my liver had to be wrong. He had seen the scans (two of them) and knew from the look and the growth that it was cancer. He didn’t want to rain on my parade, but he said — emphatically — that I should get the biopsy redone, and he would do it himself, if I wanted. I talked it over with my daughter and decided to have the biopsy redone. Dr. Moore did it using a slightly different technique and was right. It was colon cancer that had metastasized to my liver. At least, we knew it was something that had to be dealt with, as soon as possible.

In July, 2010, I went to Mission Hospital in Asheville, NC, and Dr. Moore performed a radio frequency ablation of the tumor in my liver. It is good that I was a good candidate for this, because traditional surgery on the right lobe of the liver is a very serious operation. Basically, what he did was this: insert three needles (that are connected to a radio frequency generator) into my liver so that they surround the tumor. Turn on the generator to cook the tumor (think of this as a microwave oven).

Because of the size of the tumor, he had to use three needles and the results looked good on the ultrasound right after the procedure.

I went for a CT scan and checkup with Dr. Moore earlier this week and got the good news. There is no sign of cancer in my liver, the “cooked” portion completely enveloped the tumor and some surrounding tissue, and there are no signs of bleeding complications. Very good news, indeed.

So, now the surgical interventions are all done and I’m on my second round (of 24 total) of chemotherapy treatments.

Now, instead of expecting to die from this (as it looked back in March), we’re working together to cure it. That’s a huge change in expectations and perspective in only three months.

I’m a long way from being my old self. I’m tired all the time and have trouble thinking straight, but I’m definitely improving.

So, instead of closing this blog, I’ve updated it to the latest version of WordPress, changed the theme, and spruced it up for another few years of talking about affiliate marketing.

I will not be posting as often as I did previously, but this blog is not going to just sit here, either. I will definitely be putting more effort into building evergreen, content-rich, hierarchically-organized websites than I will into blogging, but both have a part to play in my marketing plans.

I want to thank everyone who sent me their encouragement and support in the comments here, on my Facebook profile, and in email and phone calls. It meant a lot, and still does. I think your outpouring of support, encouragement, and prayers is one of the major reasons that I’m looking forward to conquering this cancer, instead of being its victim.

So, that’s enough about me. Let’s get back to talking about affiliate marketing.

(Now, I have to remember how I added that subscribe via email form on this blog. Scratching head…)

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: ,

How much is enough?

November 16, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 11 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Musings 

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

Tags: ,

Some thoughts about affiliate marketing

November 3, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 15 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Musings, Sitesell and Site Build It, Success and Failure 

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

Tags: , ,

Why do I accept or delete comments?

October 2, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 11 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Musings 

Even though I have had little to say on this blog for the last month or so, I’ve been here reading the comments that have been submitted, and I’m sad to say that the great majority of them have been deleted. Some have been submitted to Askimet as spam.

I don’t like doing that.

I deliberately set up this blog to follow comment links and I think that’s fair if you’re going to take the time to contribute to our discussions.

However, the word “contribute” is the key word in that sentence.

A one sentence response telling me I’m doing a good job just isn’t contributing to the conversation, and I delete those. I’ve deleted several dozen of these non-helpful comments over the last month.

Trying to spam this blog with off-topic comments, especially when they link to sites I’d never link to, is a good way to get sent to the spam page where your comments will be deleted and reported to Askimet.

If you want me to approve your comment and welcome you, then there are several things you should do.

Tell me who you are.

Either use your name as the link back to your blog or sign the comment with your name. Preferably first and last name.

A marginal comment with a name in the link and the comment will generally be approved.

However, if you use keywords or the name of your site in your link, that’s one strike against you.

If you don’t use your name in the link and don’t sign your comment, that’s a second strike against you.

If your comment is marginal and you have two strikes against you, I’ll delete it. This isn’t baseball, so I don’t have to wait for three strikes.

On the other hand, even if you have two strikes against you and your comment is relevant, useful, and adds to the conversation, I will usually approve it.

I like talking to real people, not keywords and not site names.

I’m going to be even more strict about this in the future.

As much as I enjoy discussing these topics, I hate not knowing to whom I am talking.

There are other reasons I would delete a comment, but I don’t feel a need to go into all of them here.

Once I get back on track to where I feel like I can add information related to affiliate marketing, I’ll resume posting here.

I’ll be looking forward to your comments and discussions, as long as you are a real person who treats me like a real person, too.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: ,

Keep on trying

September 7, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 14 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Musings 

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

Tags: , , ,

What do you do when something you love becomes a chore?

September 2, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 19 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Aweber Autoresponders, Musings, Sitesell and Site Build It, email marketing 

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

Tags: , ,

Thank you, Mitch

September 2, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 10 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Musings 

I want to take a moment and thank my friend, Mitch, for the very kind words about me on his Blog Day 2009 post.

I also want to thank him for introducing me to the Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online. I have a feeling that reading what Marelisa has to say will become one of my favorite early morning activities. It’s nice to find someone who thinks about a lot of the same things I do, but expresses her thoughts much better. She’s not even afraid of writing a long post! ;)

Thanks, Mitch. You’ve been kind and expanded my world at the same time. I appreciate it.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , , ,

I no longer open email with subjects that include certain words

August 20, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 14 Comments
Filed under: Musings, Opinions, Writing, email marketing 

I was going through several hundred emails this morning and the more I looked at the subjects, the more I got annoyed by some of them.

Now, this has taken years to start bothering me, but today, I think I reached my limit.

I posted a tweet on Twitter that said, “I no longer open email with subjects that include words like sneaky, exclusive, tricks, secrets, hurry, and so on.”

Others quickly agreed, aj1996 said, “Wish people would do the same with Lens titles & NOT inc words like “secrets” !!!!!!”

I agree with that, too. The same goes for books, ebooks, reports, and everything else.

Brian D. Hawkins said, “Hi John, many email clients spam emails with words like that automatically.”

That’s where I got confused.

I know that some of the emails I receive with those words are spam, but some come from real people.

I’ve read all sorts of books about copywriting and writing headlines, and most of them suggest using “power words” and words that create urgency and excitement.

I think that’s fine and good for headlines in print ads and in real snail mail letters, but it’s overkill when you see dozens of emails in one morning that use those same words.

Folks, there are no secrets to marketing success. It’s a matter of finding the best products and services and promoting them honestly.

Now and then, someone will come up with a new idea that will be popular and soon everyone else (the people I call “me, too” marketers) will run it into the ground and ruin the effectiveness.

For example, a year or two ago, someone started using “The Death of…” to sell an ebook. (My memory is hazy on this, since I wasn’t interested in the product.)

Before you could turn around a couple of times, I started getting emails about the death of this and the death of that and it became pitiful in a week or two.

Today, I really became annoyed when I saw all those email subject lines. I looked at the subject and then at who was sending the email to me. I opened not a single one of them — poof, right into the trash.

So, what do you think about this?

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , ,

Deleting old bookmarks on Delicious.com

August 18, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 8 Comments
Filed under: Act On Your Dream!, Musings, Web Services 

For the last several days, I have been diligently working to update and rebuild all of my Act On Your Dream! website.

This is one of my favorite sites and I was dismayed to see how much I’ve neglected updating and adding new information to the site. That’s something I plan to remedy in the coming weeks.

This morning, I was editing the Delicious Tag Cloud page and noticed that there were tags for things I’m no longer interested in and others that I no longer promote.

It’s been awhile since I’ve really worked with Delicious.com (used to be del.icio.us) and I realized that I had several dozen bookmarks that I needed to delete and others that needed to be edited to remove tags that were no longer appropriate.

It was a fairly easy process and I was reminded why I like Delicious.com more than the other bookmarking sites.

Do you use bookmarking sites to share your bookmarks with others? When is the last time you took a look to see if you’re showing what you want to share, now?

It took maybe an hour to update over 200 bookmarks and to winnow them down to less than 200. They make it easy.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , , , ,

Making progress by going backwards

August 10, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 18 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Amazon, Marketing, Musings, Squidoo Lenses 

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

Tags: , , ,

Next Page »