Twitter – a few thoughts

September 18, 2011 by John Dilbeck · 11 Comments
Filed under: Musings, Twitter 

Good afternoon,

I have a bunch of different email accounts, including one old and very public one that has been overrun by spam, despite using multiple tools to stop the spammers. It used to be my primary email address, but now I only check it once per week.

After spending a couple of hours going through hundreds of irrelevant emails and finding about a dozen worth reading and responding to, I then turned my attention to Twitter.

I’m nobody special and I am not a Twitter guru, so you can heed or ignore my thoughts about Twitter.

I get a lot of people who choose to follow my Twitter account every week. I follow only a few of them. When I don’t follow them back, many of them unfollow me. I think that’s reasonable.

I generally follow maybe 5 – 10% of the people who follow me. I also follow a few leaders in the fields in which I am most interested, even though I know that they’ll never follow me.

Some people think that Twitter is a quid pro quo type of site, i.e., if you follow me, I’ll follow you, and vice versa.

I don’t think of it that way.

I follow people who tend to write interesting, original tweets.

I always go look at the Twitter profile of anyone who follows me. If I have any interest in the things listed in their biography, I look at their tweets. If they look to be original and interesting, I follow that person.

However, my main mindset (after going through all the spam in my email account) is to look for reasons not to follow someone on Twitter.

I’m not a conversationalist on Twitter. I save that for Facebook and my blog comments.

However, when I have some free time, every day or two, I go look at Twitter and see if I find any tweets that pique my interest and were posted by the people I follow. As a word nerd, I know that the word “pique” has two diametrically-opposed meanings. It can mean that something stimulates my interest, or that something irritates me. I use it deliberately here in both senses of its meaning.

What stimulates my interest:

People who are original and authentic. They are tweeting about what interests them. Some are personal, some are business-related, some are retweets, some are conversational.

That leads me to think that these are real people who may provide something of interest, even if their current tweets do not.

(Using that definition, I’m not as authentic as the people I want to follow. I mostly tweet about things related to business, including new posts on blogs, updated websites, new conversations on communities I manage, and the like. I rarely use Twitter for conversations and personal tweets. I do that mostly on Facebook. As you can see from anything I write, I do not do well with a 140 character limit.)

So, if that person has recently followed me, and their tweets pique my interest, I follow them.

What irritates me:

However, these are some of the things I look for that are signals that I don’t want to follow someone.

If their account display name is anything like SmallBusinessGuruSecrets, I’m out of there in a flash. Close the window. Next.

If all of their tweets are about the same thing, over and over and over. Click. I’m gone.

If they have loaded their account with a ton of quotes that are automatically tweeted, I give them the brief benefit of the doubt. I’ll look down their profile and see if there is anything interesting that they have written, personally. If not, click. Gone.

(I like quotes as much as the next person, and more than most. I study and think about quotes, but after awhile, just quoting others provides no interesting insight into you and what you are all about. It wastes everyone’s time.)

An occasional, good quote that is used to illustrate something or provide a jumping off point for further discussion is a good thing. An automated steady stream of quotes about unrelated topics is not.

If I look at their profile and their tweets are protected and I have to ask to follow them before seeing what they are all about, click. I’m outa there.

If their tweets are all “text talk” abbreviations and not standard English, I’m gone.

If their tweets are full of grammar errors, no grammar, and misspellings. See ya.

There are many other reasons I’ll leave and never follow someone. Those are some of the ones that irritate me the most.

What makes me unfollow someone:

If I choose to follow them and then receive an immediate automatic direct message pitching something, I go immediately to their profile and unfollow them. They haven’t earned my attention for a pitch, yet.

If they send me to some site to validate that I’m following them, I go to their profile and immediately unfollow them.

If they send me a direct message about anything that isn’t a personal message, I’m outa there. Click. No more following them.

What makes me enjoy following someone:

If they provide good, quality information about their main topic of interest and it’s not all pitches, then I generally look forward to seeing what they have to say.

If they link to a good article related to their interests (which I share with them), I’ll go read it. The more helpful and informative the article, the more they rise on my list of people I enjoy following. It doesn’t matter a lot whether it was written by them or someone else, as long as it is helpful, honest, factual, and informative.

I live to learn new things and to learn more about the things I know and enjoy. If someone helps me in that quest, I enjoy seeing what they have to say and look forward to reading it. That is what puts them at the top of the list of people to whom I pay attention.

I’m no Twitter expert

I’m not an expert nor a guru. I am not trying to tell anyone what they can do with their Twitter account. That’s up to them and Twitter.

I’m just telling what I look for and a few of the reasons I follow or don’t follow people who follow me.

What about you?

You probably have a different approach to how you enjoy using Twitter and the people with whom you like to interact. That’s good. Do what works best for you.

Do you have any things in particular that interest you or annoy you, related to deciding whether you will follow or unfollow someone on Twitter?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Empire Avenue – the fun social networking stock market game

September 11, 2011 by John Dilbeck · 4 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Business Networking, Facebook, John Dilbeck, Musings, Social Networking 

Now, for something a little different.

I’m a hard working guy and I spend most of my waking time working on my marketing business, writing blog posts, creating new pages on my websites, and interacting on some of the social networking sites, most notably: Facebook.

A couple of weeks ago, two of my friends were talking about a website where we can earn credit for what we’re already doing. Now, let me make it clear that we can’t earn money, but we earn value in our stock in this game, and we can earn eaves, which is what the site calls their virtual currency.

It’s like a social networking stock market and we earn by being active with our blogs and on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and others.

When you join Empire Avenue, you get some money to purchase “stock” in others who are playing the game, and there are a lot of people doing it. I bought stock in folks like Guy Kawasaki and Mari Smith and other well-known social networking “stars.”

(Note: we are not buying ownership in each other. It’s just a game.)

Folks bought shares of my stock, too, and that gave me more money to invest.

I’ve been buying more shares in the people who invested in me, as I earn more “money” with which to purchase their stock. It’s been a lot of fun.

I’m also buying stock in people I’ve never met before, based on recommendations from others who are playing the game.

I used to enjoy investing in the real stock market, and the Empire Avenue game offers a lot of the same fun with no financial risk.

It also provides another way to expose people to our various social networks and blog feeds.

You can add multiple RSS feeds to your Connections tab, but each feed needs to be endorsed by at least five people before you start getting credit for your blogging activities. And, the credit you receive for blogging is limited, because it’s just too easy for people to cheat by adding the RSS feed of a robotic “splog.”

I’m not playing the game to try to win it; I’m playing for fun and to expose my sites to more people.

I generally buy some shares of the people who invest in my stock, but don’t promise a quid pro quo.

I’ve also bought shares in the stock of some of my online friends who are not playing the game, yet. I can say I’m the first to buy their stock, and I get it at the absolute lowest price, should they decide to start playing the game.

If you’re already playing the Empire Avenue game, I’m still a good investment, but I’ll be crossing the $50 per share price shortly. Invest in me now, before the price goes up! (grin)

Seriously, I go there a couple of times per day and spend maybe five or ten minutes investing in more stock. It’s a nice, short break from work, and still does a little to promote my work. Since I enjoy combining work and fun, this is a good match.

It’s a bit confusing at first, but I’m starting to find my way around. That makes it even more enjoyable. I don’t think I’ll ever spend more than 15 or 20 minutes there on any given day, probably less, but it’s a nice break, now and then.

While it’s not for everyone, it makes it a little more fun to think about myself as representing my marketing business and it’s fun when someone at Empire Avenue buys stock in me.

If you’re looking for a site to purchase advertising and want to expose your sites and blogs to others who are active in social networking, there are ways to spend real money buying advertising and credits. I haven’t done any of that, and don’t have any plans to do so, at this time. I don’t know what I’ll do as I learn more about the site and all that’s available there.

Empire Avenue also has communities where you can interact with others who share the same interests. I don’t have time for that, so I haven’t tried it.

Join Empire Avenue and try it for yourself. It’s free, and you can sign in through your Facebook account, or create a separate Empire Avenue account. It’s your choice.

What about you?

Are you playing Empire Avenue? What do you think about it?

Act on your dream!

JD

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I really dislike unethical people

August 23, 2011 by John Dilbeck · 18 Comments
Filed under: Ethics, Musings, Opinions 

I really, really dislike unethical people.

When I was sick, I gave up a number of websites I developed over the years. Some intentionally, one by accident when I failed to renew it while I was in the hospital.

While doing some Google searches as part of my continuing tracking of keyword phrases for which I compete, I found several of my old domains still on page one of Google. When I visited the sites, the new owners were still showing my old content on those sites — but they had added lots of links to things I would NEVER endorse.

It really bothers me that people might mistake the new links on my old domains as recommendations from me and I hate to think that someone would waste time and/or money thinking they were following my advice.

So, I decided that it was time to have my copyrighted work removed from those domains. What they are doing is unethical and illegal.

A couple of days ago, I spent a few hours sending emails to the new owners of the domains to notify them that I’ll be filing DMCA notifications of copyright infringement, if they don’t remove all references to me, my business, and any materials I produced.

In a couple of cases, they’re still showing MY copyright on their pages.

I accidentally lost one domain last spring, when I failed to renew it while I was in the hospital. The only value it can possibly have for the new owner is that I’m still sending visitors there, because I haven’t had time and energy to remove all the links from my sites to that domain.

I hated to lose that domain, because it was going to play a role in my local marketing plans over the coming years.

I intentionally gave up several domains when I decided to de-emphasize blogging this year. They may have value to the new owners, but some of them are wasting it, in my opinion. I don’t understand why they don’t just delete all my old content and start over, instead of using so much of what I produced and leaving themselves open to a copyright infringement claim.

I just don’t understand that type of thinking.

They’re selling their souls for a pittance of money they may make from the domains, and if they don’t remove my material, I’ll also file a DMCA notice with Google and that can jeopardize their Adsense accounts.

All they have to do is remove everything I produced. Then they can do whatever they want with the domains.

Over time, I’ll find and remove the links from my current sites to those domains.

If anyone is reading this who is playing fast and loose with copyrighted material, stop and think. Don’t steal what others have produced.

Write your own articles, take your own photographs, create your own graphics.

Other people will steal them and reuse them, but they live on the dark side.

I find lots of sites that are illegally using photos I took and posted on my sites. Eventually, I’ll start filing DMCA notices against those site owners, too.

I always send a notice that they are infringing, telling them to remove all the material I created. I also inform them that I’ll file the DMCA notices in two weeks, if they don’t.

It’s a hassle. But some people just don’t believe the law applies to them.

Use the force, dear readers!

Be a creator, not a plagiarist.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Unrealistic expectations about building an online business

June 13, 2011 by John Dilbeck · 57 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Musings, Sitesell and Site Build It, Success and Failure 

This morning, I was reading a forum message from a very unhappy new online marketer who was complaining of all the hard work he put into his business and the complete lack of results he had gotten out of it.

I think we can all relate to that, at some point and on some level.

So, out of curiosity, I went and looked at his website (a blog, in this case) and wasn’t surprised that he was getting no results.

The blog had only 19 posts over a bit less than two months and there was no theme or niche orientation that I could see.

I don’t see any point in mentioning this man’s name or the URL of his blog. I’m sure I could do a little research and come up with dozens of similar examples.

In his complaining forum post, he said that he had been working very hard on his online business and wanted to quit his job and do this full-time. He was behind his planned schedule.

What?

Does anyone really believe they can start a website or blog or anything else and make enough profit in two months to replace a full-time job? If so, they need to face some facts.

If you want immediate income, sell something you already own or get a job (if you can).

If you want to build a business and live off the profits, it’s going to take time, a plan, lots of energy and creativity, and the investment of money to succeed.

Yes, it costs less to start a website, but you’re completely invisible until the search engines start referring visitors and you won’t get a lot of that without writing pages with quality information and building links to your site so the search engines will find and index those pages. This takes time, and I don’t mean two months.

(I’m assuming that you are not buying ads on other sites, using Google Adwords or Facebook ads or anything similar. That can drive immediate traffic, but it adds to your expenses, too. If you can make a profit, it can be a good way to get visitors to your site.)

If you want to build an offline business, it takes tens of thousands of dollars and more time. Most new businesses should expect to have losses every month for at least the first couple of years and often for longer than that.

Business isn’t a game of days or weeks of work before earning a profit, it is often a game of years of work before you realize an income from all the work you’ve done during that time.

People with get rich schemes tell you that you can earn tens of thousands of dollars (or pounds or Euros or whatever) in a few days or weeks. They are lying to you to get you to buy their products.

If you’d like to prove me wrong on that point, I’m listening.

Just today, I did not approve comments from two people who were linking to the same get rich quick scheme from their comment. No thank you. Life is too short and there are too many other real opportunities to build a business for me to be a part of promoting such wastes of time and money, even from the link from a comment.

How long does it take to build a business?

That’s kind of like asking, “How long is a piece of string?”

The answer, of course, is, “It depends.”

It depends on a lot things. What are you selling? How big is the target market? How well can you reach them? Can you overcome their objections? What else can they buy with the same amount of money?

Those aren’t the best questions, but they are apropos to the point I’m trying to make.

It takes time and work to build a business.

Do you think large businesses like Sears, J. C. Penney’s, and Walmart were built overnight? No, they weren’t. Each of them started from humble beginnings and the owners invested years and most of their revenue into growing the businesses.

(I’m just using those three as examples, because they were the first that came to mind, since I already knew some of the history of their businesses and how they built them. There are thousands of other examples that could be chosen.)

Except for a few exceptions, most large businesses started very small and grew over time.

Richard Sears got into the retail business when he purchased a shipment of watches that a local jeweler didn’t want. He was a train station agent and he sold these watches to other station agents for a tidy profit.

The first Sears catalog was published in 1888. They didn’t open their first retail store until 1925, nearly 40 years after he started selling those watches.

James Cash Penney opened a small dry goods store in 1902. Over the years, the company grew and opened more retail stores. They published their first catalog in 1963 and what was the forerunner of their current website started selling on the online in 1994. It took them over 60 years to start their catalog and over 90 years to enter online commerce.

In the 1940s, Sam Walton began his retail career when he worked for J. C. Penney. In 1950, he opened Walton’s 5 & 10 store. In 1962, they invested most of the company capital to open the first Walmart store. In 1968, after opening several stores in Arkansas, they opened their first store in a different state. They opened their first Wal-Mart Supercenter in 1988.

The point I’m trying to make is that these retail pioneers started small and invested a lot of time, energy, and money into building their business. They reinvested their profits and grew. (Of course, unlike most small businesses and almost all micro businesses, they also received capital from investors who bought their stock and that gave them more resources to continue growing.)

None of them had a successful business with less than twenty pages of questionable content on the Internet. None of them had a profitable business in less than two months. All of them invested lots of money (for their time) in opening their stores and purchasing inventory.

Now, the pace of change has quickened. It’s not unusual to hear that someone started an online company and became millionaires or billionaires after a decade or less. Those are the exceptions. They are not the norm.

People, maybe you, have acquired unrealistic expectations on how long it takes to succeed with an online business. They have unrealistic expectations about how much money they’ll make.

Unless you are very lucky, or very talented, or both, you will not become the next uberbillionaire. If you were working on that project you would not have time to read my quaint little blog.

Even a company that I respect and admire — Sitesell — makes the mistake of using terms that lead to an unrealistic expectation for how long it will take to build an online business.

They use a 10-Day process for analyzing and building a new niche-oriented business.

While they make it very clear in their documentation, Action Guide, and most of their online marketing, that a “Day” in this process does not equal a 24-hour day in the real world, I think it is misleading to folks who try to rush through the process without slowing down, reading the documentation, watching the videos, and proceeding at a more reasonable pace.

It’s true that some of those “Days” tasks can be completed in two or three days in real time, but some of them will take months to complete, or represent ongoing activities that may be performed for years as part of building and promoting an online business.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Sitesell used to have the entire Action Guide online, but it has been privatized for the benefit of their customers, only. However, they do have a series of videos about the process they teach for building an online business and those videos are available free on YouTube. They are an abridged version of the videos that are part of the Video Action Guide that comes with a subscription to SBI.

Nowhere, though, do they say that it will be easy and free and your inbox will overflow with people rushing to send you money with no work on your part.

Others, however, say exactly that. They try to sell you software and systems that they claim will make you rich in a few weeks.

Who are you going to believe?

Think it through for yourself. If someone has an automatic system for making huge amounts of money online with no effort nor experience, why would they sell it? Wouldn’t they use it themselves and reap the benefits?

If you had one, would you sell a goose that laid golden eggs?

Of course not.

It is possible to build a business that makes a good profit. It can be done offline in a brick and mortar business or it can be done online with a website that does the selling.

In neither case is it easy nor guaranteed. Some of us succeed. Some of us don’t. Then, we try again.

I love working on my sites from the comfort of my home in the mountains. I don’t just like it, I love it.

I’m not rich and I’m not even doing as well as I was a few years ago before I got so sick. Now that I’m much better, it’s time to get back to work and equal or exceed the success I enjoyed few years ago.

I’m using a combination of affiliate marketing on some sites and promoting locally owned brick and mortar businesses on other sites. There are countless niches in which a profitable online business can be built.

It can be done.

Can you do it?

I don’t know.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: ,

Focus, planning, and implementation

October 13, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 2 Comments
Filed under: Act On Your Dream!, Advertising and Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Downline Builders, Musings, Network Marketing, Sitesell and Site Build It, Traffic Exchanges 

It’s a beautiful rainy day in the mountains of North Carolina. All the trees are taking a shower before putting on their finest Autumn party leaves and painting our mountains with spectacular color, making them even more beautiful than they are the rest of the year.

Today, I’m sitting at home, sipping some hot coffee, and I’m focused on planning the changes I’m making in my online marketing business.

Somewhere along the way, I lost that focus. Now, I’m working hard to regain it.

I understand business, at least enough to do well enough so that I can live as I please, set my own schedule, and be my own boss.

When I started out with online marketing over a decade ago (way back in the 20th century!), I was fully focused on business. I knew what I wanted to accomplish and I was working hard to implement the plan. It was easy for me and there were few distractions along the way.

However, a few years ago, things changed. I began to get distracted by new technologies, new social networking sites, new marketing techniques, new toys to learn and use, new this, new that, and I lost focus of my plan and many of my goals.

It’s easy to do.

I’ve written about this before, and I’ll probably write about it again. Focus and a well-thought-out plan, with goals to achieve, and milestones to gauge progress are necessary for every business that is oriented to long-term success.

When plowing with a mule or horse, we put blinders on them so that they can only see straight ahead and focus on where they are pulling the plow. That way, they don’t get distracted by other things that may be going on around them.

These days, in regards to my business, I put on metaphorical blinders before working. It helps me to focus specifically on what I want to accomplish during the next few hours.

If you are involved in online marketing in any way, you already know what I mean. All of your friends are doing different things. One suggests that you do something, another invites you to do something different, you get a newsletter in your inbox that tells you that something (like email, Google, etc.) is dead or dying and you have to do what they’re advising (and you can learn all about it by buying their new (ebook, membership site, webinar, course) product for only $47 (or $97, or $197, or $497…).

Before you even get started with what you were going to do, you’re already being pulled in multiple directions. Soon, self-doubt sets in. Are you doing what you should be doing, or do you need to do something entirely different? The more distractions, the more self-doubt. The more self-doubt, the less progress you will make.

I know this for a fact. I’ve gone through it and I’m looking back on much of what I’ve done over the last few years with a sense of amazement. I’m amazed that I let myself forget good common business sense and well-established marketing techniques and spent my time chasing all the shiny, new, red balls that kept bouncing along all around me.

One of my friends was talking to my daughter a few months ago about a mutual friend of theirs. He said she was suffering from ADOS syndrome. My daughter asked, “What’s ADOS?”

He replied, “Attention Deficit…Oh, Shiny!”

Many of us are suffering from the same thing. We’re losing the ability to focus. We expect immediate (or at least very fast) gratification. We want sound bites that coincide with our prejudices and predilections rather than in-depth knowledge and understanding. We want easy money with the least amount of work possible.

That’s no way to build a business. It might be okay for a hobby or a temporary distraction, but it’s a sure-fire way to fail in business.

Ken Evoy wrote in a recent blog post, Focus and Determination, “Very few small businesses go straight up like a rocket. Some businesses go faster, some take longer. And when you’re all by yourself at home, working and building content and getting links and progress is slow, it’s easy to have some doubt about your niche or your ability to make your website ‘work.’ Work through the doubts. Like every business, success goes to those who persevere… ”

Perseverance without a plan and tight focus isn’t enough.

You also have to put your words in front of someone who is in the mood to buy, has the resources, and finds the information you offer reliable enough to make the decision.

Whether we choose to build content-rich, hierarchically-organized websites or write a blog, we need to create something that ranks well in the search engines, and even more importantly, is something that people are looking for with a mindset of buying. It does us absolutely no good to attract a loyal group of readers, friends, and associates who like to read what we say and join in the conversations, but who are never going to be a customer or client. You need to attract people who are interested in what you’re writing about and want to buy something related to it that either solves a problem they’re having or links to something they want to buy.

Marketing to other marketers is a huge waste of time and energy. We are sellers, not buyers, for the most part. Now and then, we may find something we want to buy, but many of us are do-it-yourselvers and would rather spend the time and effort in learning something for ourselves rather than purchase something that you are offering.

You know what I’m talking about.

Compare that with someone who has a passion for a hobby or other interest. They have a good job and love spending money on their hobby. Whether it be raising dogs, gardening, travel, camping, fishing, weddings, photography, games, movie collectibles, dolls, or anything else in which they are passionately interested, they want to do more of it and they have the money to spend.

Most of them don’t care if they ever get their money back or make a profit on their “investment.” The purchase is part of the enjoyment. It’s part of the anticipation of enjoying more of what they do.

Those are the people you want to attract. People are searching billions of times a day for something in which they are interested. You need to learn what they are looking for, evaluate your competition, and then do a better job of providing information, products, and services that all these people want.

The best way to do that is to identify something for which you have a passion (or at least a strong interest), research the topic, identify what people want related to that niche, and then find a way to be found by them.

There are many ways to be found. The least expensive and often easiest is to rank well in the search engines for the terms for which they are searching.

Other ways include traditional advertising, coupons, newsletters, mailing lists, interviews, radio, TV, and all the other ways of inserting yourself and what you offer into their attention.

If you haven’t read “Guerilla Marketing” by Jay Conrad Levinson, do it this week. It was written before the Internet and the Web, and it still offers outstanding advice for selling what you are offering.

With my Murphy Gold site, I’m focused 100% on locally-owned small businesses in the rural area surrounding Murphy, NC. Most of my marketing will be done online, but I’ll also be using what I’ve learned about local offline marketing, too.

Most people do not live in the online world as much as many of us do. They don’t spend hours on Twitter, Facebook, or whatever.

No. Really. I’m serious.

They have real lives that don’t involve blogs, websites, social networking, social bookmarking, and may not even know what an ebook is.

And many of them could become your best customer if you find a way to offer what they want and put yourself in front of them when they’re ready to purchase.

One way to do that, in both the offline and online world, is to offer something free.

In Internet Marketing, people offer free ebooks in return to get you to sign up for their mailing list. This has been effective in the past, but is getting less effective as time goes by.

How many free ebooks or reports do you have on your computer that you’ve never read or even skimmed? I’m willing to bet there are quite a few. If you ever took the time to read them, you’d quickly discover that a very few are outstanding and offer great information. Some are good and worth a read or quick skim. Others, and I’m willing to bet they are the majority, are worthless. They were put together quickly with little quality control, lack of any depth of knowledge of the subject, or any other intention other than offering you a bauble to get you to sign up to their marketing list.

And, then, to top it off, most of those marketing lists are just as bad. In fact, I’ve seen more than one “marketing guru” advise giving anything away to get someone to sign up for your list, and then you can “market” to them (nearly) for free until they buy what you’re selling or unsubscribe from your list. When they do buy, add them to the next list in your marketing funnel and repeat the process with something more expensive that offers more profit. Ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

Don’t fall for that.

Yes, some successful businesses have involved and very profitable marketing funnels and they do well for the owner. I am not disputing that. If that’s the way you want to live, then go for it.

I don’t.

When I talk about offering something for free, I’m not talking about giving something away to get your readers to sign up for your mailing list.

I’m talking about building a site with lots of free, high-quality, authoritative information about a topic you really know and in which you and your reader are both interested.

I want to develop real relationships (perhaps friendships) with real people about something I really care about. I want to offer the best information I can to them for free and also give them ways to purchase things they want.

I have not done a good job of that. Why? Because I was not focused on doing business. I was distracted by “online marketing.”

I’ve come to view affiliate marketing as more than just advertising. You probably will disagree with me on this, and feel free to do so.

Over time, I’ve promoted a lot of things. I had to learn the ropes, make my mistakes, learn from some of them, and try not to repeat those same mistakes.

I got sidetracked into downline builders, traffic exchanges, and social networking on lots of sites that produced no (or very small) results. I tried multilevel marketing. I tried all sorts of ways to build traffic and turn visitors into dollars.

Then one day, I put on my blinders and walked off those treadmills. I was making what lots of people would call a good income, but none of us were getting anywhere from it. It was a treadmill that lead to nowhere and all we were doing was trying to run fast enough to bring in a trickle of income.

Yes it works. I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m saying it’s bad for me. It’s not something I can look back on with pride and satisfaction knowing that I helped others. If anything, I’m responsible for sucking some of them into that same “running on the treadmill to nowhere” scenario and calling it a business.

I stopped doing all of that and I’m canceling accounts on hundreds of sites.

Mea culpa.

Would I want to get my best friend, parent, sibling, or child doing all of that just to earn a few (hundred) dollars per month? No.

So, I asked myself, what DO I want to do? What can I do that will be satisfying, helpful, and real?

I took a close and not-too-comfortable look at myself and started shedding lots of things I had “learned” from “marketing gurus” and “online business mentors” and “coaches.”

My new criteria is this: Would I offer something to my mother or my daughter?

If the answer is no, then I won’t offer it to you.

That greatly simplifies things for me.

Getting back to Murphy Gold for a moment…

I will only promote businesses on that site that I would recommend to my mother or daughter. Each business on that site is a personal recommendation from me. I’ve turned down several business owners because I don’t like the way they run their business or treat their customers.

I only contact business owners with whom I’ve had good, long-term relationships, or who were recommended by more than one person I trust who lives in the community and has done business with that business owner. I offer to promote them online for a fee. In the future, as I get healthier, I’ll also be promoting them offline in our community (and it won’t cost them any extra).

I have a lot of work to do on that site. I started in one direction, learned from a few mistakes, and now I’m tweaking it to make it better. I still have hundreds of pages to write, but I’ve already done the majority of the research and I’ve developed a site blueprint. I know where it’s going and how to get there. I’ve focused and planned.

Now, it’s time for implementation.

I have to knuckle-down and do the work. It’s going to take time to write those hundreds of pages and then promote them where the residents of our community (and those who are interested in visiting and/or moving to Murphy, NC) will find them, and that means both online and offline promotions.

Focus, planning, and implementation.

While most of my other sites rely on Google Adsense and affiliate links for monetization, Murphy Gold will focus on introducing real people (customers) to other real people (business owners) so that they can do what people have been doing for centuries — trading money for goods and services.

It’s real business. It’s real people. It’s real relationships. It’s real.

It’s something I’ll be able to look back on in twenty years (if I make it) and be proud of doing.

Affiliate marketing will play a very small part in monetizing visitors to Murphy Gold.

Google Adsense will play some part in monetizing some parts of the site, as long as it doesn’t conflict with the main goal of promoting local business owners who deserve it. Anyone can buy ads on Google Adwords and I don’t have much control of that, so I’ll only be putting Adsense ads on some of the pages. I don’t yet know exactly which pages that will be and it’s going to take some testing.

On other sites, such as Act On Your Dream!, Adsense and affiliate links will play a bigger role. I’ve been developing a new blueprint for that site and it will be reorganized and revitalized as I have the energy. It’s never been a huge monetary success, but it’s about a topic in which I’m extremely interested and I have some ideas on how I want to proceed with it.

Other sites will be taken down, including GeorgiaDragRacing.com, which I built for my brother. It has been a very profitable site, but his health problems have gotten to the point where he can no longer go to the drag racing events and publish the photos and information he once could. So, he wants me to burn it to a DVD and take it down. It’s his site, and I’ll do what he wants as soon as I can. (I have some technical problems involving old software and new computers to solve before I can get the database to generate a complete local copy of that site and burn it to a DVD for him.)

Over time, most of what’s in JohnDilbeck.com, MurphyNC28906.com, and other smaller sites will be moved into AYearFromNow.com or MurphyGold.com. Part of my focus is to keep the best and toss the rest. I’ll be consolidating information from my blogs and some of my websites into sites that are powered by SBI, because it works best for me.

Eventually, I’ll be off the blogging treadmill, too.

In the short term, I’ll lose some income as I take down sites that have lots of visitors and make money. In the long term, I’ll be able to focus more on what I’m doing and to implement the plan I’ve developed.

If you’re still reading this, you’re one of the few who have a reasonable attention span and I applaud you.

I know that I’m moving in a different direction than most affiliate marketers and I’ll probably move some of the information from here into AYearFromNow.com and take down this blog, too. I’ll miss some of the social interaction that comes from the comments on this blog, but — again — I’ll be able to focus more on my new business plan.

Affiliate marketing has been good to me for over a decade and will continue to be one of the larger streams of income, but it is going to change and I’ll only be promoting products and services that, get ready for it, here it comes…I’d recommend to my Mom or daughter.

I learned a long time ago to write a page with one main objective. Simple pages that offer quality information and which lead to a desired action step or alternative backup action that I want the reader to take.

Some pages are purely informational. Google Adsense is a good way to monetize them (as long as someone is advertising using the keywords for which the page is built).

Some pages are designed to get people to drive to a business, get out of their car, and go inside a store. I won’t have anything competing with those.

Some pages are designed to promote things to do in surrounding cities and they’ll have Adsense and some affiliate links on them.

For each page, I’ll have one thing I want the reader to do. Failing that, I’ll link to other pages on the site.

Keep it simple. Reduce distractions. Make it easy to read, tightly focused, and easy to navigate.

Will I be the best at doing this? Probably not. In my heart, I’m a techno-nerd, not a businessman.

I’ll do my best and continue living in a place I love and telling the world more about it.

Hopefully, it will provide a comfortable income, too.

What about you?

Have you planned your business and decided what you want to accomplish?

What is it?

Do you agree or disagree with my belief that what I promote on my site (other than Adsense ads) is a personal recommendation?

I’m interested in your thoughts about focusing on your business and achieving your goals.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags:

What is your time worth?

October 9, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 10 Comments
Filed under: Act On Your Dream!, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Forums, Marketing, Musings, Sitesell and Site Build It, Webhosting, Websites, WordPress 

And, even more directly, what is my time worth?

That’s the question I’m asking myself this morning.

This evening, a little over 100 miles from here, my high school classmates are having our 40th high school reunion and I would love to go and see them. We’ve become reacquainted this year on Facebook and we’re sharing tidbits about our families and what’s happening with all of us.

That makes this year different.

In the past, I didn’t mind missing the reunions because I’d lost touch with everyone, even my best friends from high school. This year, it’s different. I’m reading their stories and they’re reading mine. We’ve reconnected — as people and not just names and memories.

40 years is a long time, and yet, in many ways, it seems to have flown by. In other ways, it feels like it’s been an eternity since I saw any of them.

Since I had to make the decision, this morning, that I couldn’t make it to this reunion, due to being weak and tired from this week’s chemotherapy, I got to thinking about other things I’ve done with my time.

I look back on the last 40 years and I like that I concentrated on computers and mastered them enough to build a decent career as a consultant, teacher, programmer, and administrator. It made it possible for me to move here to Murphy, NC, and I love living here in the mountains and out of the rat race. I invested over a decade in the big cities of Atlanta and Phoenix and was then able to bring myself and my business here.

I like that I have good friends who care about me as much as I care about them. That, too, takes time.

For the rest of this post, I’m going to concentrate on the last decade or so.

As you may already know, the last decade has been full of challenges for my family. For over seven years, I was the sole, full-time caretaker for my elderly mother as she battled cancer and the after-effects of the surgery. I cared for her as long as I could but she had to go into a nursing home for the last few months of her life. At least, I helped her live at home for a few more years.

This year, I’m fighting my own battle with cancer and the tide seems to have turned. I intend to win this war and get healthy and stronger. A year from now, I intend to be much better than I am today.

During all this time, my online marketing business allowed me the time to stay home and care for her, and now for myself.

(In my own case, however, I’ve had to file for disability to pay for all the medical bills and my living expenses until I can really resume working. These days, I’m able to do a bit here and there, but nowhere nearly as much as I used to do. Up until this summer, my online marketing business provided 100% of my income for most of the last decade. As soon as possible, it will once again provide the income for me to live my life as I like it.)

Just out of curiosity, I went to Alexa’s Way Back Machine and looked at the first few days of JohnDilbeck.com as it looked on October 18, 2000 — just over one more week from its 10th anniversary. (Actually, I registered the domain a few months earlier, on my birthday. In many ways, it looks much the same now as it did back then: JohnDilbeck.com)

Even in my earliest attempts, I was using affiliate marketing to earn a living. This site brought in thousands of dollars over the years.

Even my very first domain, Need-Sleep.com, was a money maker, primarily because I was one of the earliest Amazon.com affiliates. That look into the Way Back Machine shows my first money-making site as it looked about 13 years ago.

(I miss my HyperDimensional Book Nook.)

All my sites that depended upon the Amazon.com affiliate program for income took a dive when Amazon terminated all their associates in North Carolina following our legislature’s misguided attempt to bring in more taxes with their new nexus laws. Unlike some people, however, I relied on Amazon.com as only one stream in my income river, so although substantial, losing Amazon and other big retailers did not put me out of business. However, that, coupled with the massive downturn in the economy, really did put a crimp on my income. It’s a good thing I have no debts and my overhead is very low. Even with the lowered income, I was able to weather the storm and I’m starting to see my income rise, again, even though it’s only a fraction of what it once was.

Both sites were rather crude and certainly did not contain any eye candy to keep anyone entertained. Yet, both of them made money for me.

I only wish I had been smart enough to sell the Need-Sleep.com domain to someone rather than just letting the domain registration lapse.

I just looked and the domain is available. I almost registered it for old time’s sake, but decided not to. I’ve registered way too many domains over the years and most of them have been failures. Besides, now that I’m no longer a computer consultant working all around the clock, I no longer need sleep. (grin)

I won’t bother you with them, but I’ve looked at some of those old domains this morning and recognize all the hard work that I put into them and all the time that was wasted over the years.

If I had avoided all the shiny red balls that kept bouncing across my marketing pathway, and had concentrated on building websites with depth and authority, I would have earned more for my efforts.

As a consultant, I knew the value of being paid for my work and I charged accordingly. I don’t know why I forgot those hard-won lessons when I turned to Internet marketing.

I also know the value in paying for expert help when I need it, so why did I spend thousands of hours (and quite a bit of money) learning and relearning how to build “free” websites over the years? Looking back on it from my new perspective, I just don’t understand it.

Still, some of my websites did well enough that I earned a decent living, where I wanted to live, doing what I wanted to do, so that I could invest waste time learning all the new scripts, building forums, article directories, blogs, playing on traffic exchanges, learning I don’t do well with MLM, and learning another half-dozen programming languages.

What do I have to show for all that? A few dollars here and there. It’s true that I know more about all this stuff than I did, but it’s worthless knowledge, because I’ll never be able to recoup the value of the time I wasted in the process.

I’ve told you before — and some of you may be sick of hearing it — that I’m moving away from blogging (which I’ve been doing for over 10 years) and back to building hierarchically organized static websites. Over the years, even though I put more of my effort into blogging than I did into building content focused websites, very little of my income has come from my blogging efforts.

I got other things out of it, however. There was the social interaction, meeting new friends, and sharing new discoveries, but there was very little money added to my income streams.

I don’t have the exact numbers, but I’m sure my income from my best websites (which I sorely neglected over the years) outperformed my blogs by at least a ratio of 50 to 1, and maybe a bit more.

I was just looking at the first available page of my first blog (on the Way Back Machine), John Dilbeck’s Ramblings, and noticed that even the name shows my lack of focus. John Dilbeck’s Ramblings is no way to inspire confidence and help readers focus on what I’m writing about.

So, over the next ten years, I plan to focus most of my attention on two sites, Act On Your Dream! and my primary site at Murphy Gold.

Not so coincidentally, they are both powered by SBI.

I knew that SBI was a great way to build a site, but something in me, probably a personality defect, drove me to try all these other things and see if I was able to do better with them than I could by using SBI and following the Action Guide.

The only really good result from all my testing is that I have proven to myself that I’ve been spinning my wheels for many years and now it’s going to be much easier to follow what I learn from all the folks at Sitesell.

If I were starting over a couple of years ago, I would have slapped up a new WordPress blog and started rambling. Now, I’ve relearned what I learned a decade ago and I won’t make that mistake.

Ken Evoy makes the point so well on the WordPress or SBI page.

While I was playing and testing on WordPress, and making a hundred dollars here and there, my SBI sites were generating the income that gave me the free time to waste. (Two of my other sites were built based on the principles of Ken Evoy’s Make Your Site Sell! ebook, and they also generated income. They were built before SBI was available, or they would have been powered by SBI, too.)

I’ve given a lot of things the benefit of the doubt, and that includes blogging, building forums, creating article directories, and much more, and it just has not been worth the effort. If I were getting paid by the hour for all the work I’ve done on them, I would have made less than minimum wage.

What does that say about building a business? I could have earned more money with less work by slinging burgers at the local greasy spoon. Sigh.

Fortunately, a handful of websites pulled their load and earned much more than the others. That’s the direction I’m moving in, once again, following a very long detour.

So, what’s your time — and your creative talent — worth? Are you satisfied earning a few hundred dollars per month from your online business, or do you think you’re worth more?

If someone offered me $200 to be their consultant for a month, I’d turn them down, without even having to think about it. So, why would I settle for that as income from blogging all month?

Sometimes I just don’t understand myself. At least, I can learn from my mistakes.

What about you?

What is your time worth?

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags:

When email becomes overwhelming

September 29, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 10 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Musings, email marketing 

When email becomes overwhelming, it becomes a time waster and an obstacle to doing anything productive.

Normally, the most productive time in my whole day for writing and accomplishing a marketing goal is the first two or three hours of my day. Most days, I wake up around 4 or 5 am and work for two or three hours while I drink a pot of coffee. Then, it’s time for breakfast and dealing with the daily chores, such as checking the social networks I manage and moderate, responding to comments on my blogs, playing on Facebook for awhile, making sure none of my major sites have been hacked (by looking at their home pages), and dealing with email.

I’ve tried for over a decade to make it easy to find me and contact me via email. I’ve put my email address all over the web, in more places than I’ll ever remember, and now it’s coming back to bite me in the butt.

I started with email on the old ARPA network, before the Internet, before the Web, before Google, before most of the things we take for granted now. I remember when I knew (personally) only three people with email addresses besides myself. It wasn’t unusual back in those almost-prehistoric days to send an email and then call them on the phone to see if they got it.

I remember being happy when I got an email from a friend. It was a joy that was almost like receiving a birthday or Christmas card in the mail.

Those days are long gone, however.

As useful as email is, now it has become an anchor around my neck. A weight I pull uphill every morning. A cool drink of water just out of my reach. A chore to be endured rather than enjoyed.

This morning, I waded through 2286 emails (that is not an exaggeration — it’s the actual count) and deleted all but 66 of them.

I have all sorts of spam blocking rules in place, I’m using two spam blocking services, and I still manually go through all the subject lines on my email account in my browser to delete all the ones that are of no interest, are spam, or otherwise just clutter my inbox.

It took over two and a half hours just to scan all the subject lines and pull the gold nuggets out of the mud hole. (I was going to say something else a lot more gross, but I went back and edited it before publishing.)

Then I deleted and purged all those I didn’t want.

From that point, it took less than 30 seconds to download all the little gold nuggets into Eudora, my business email client of choice. Later today, I’ll work through those emails. Some I’ll read and discard. Others I’ll read and save. Others I’ll skim and save for later.

I’ve already responded to the three that needed a response and replied to a friend with a personal email.

Without all the damned spam and garbage, I could have done this task in less than five minutes and enjoyed it.

So, the time has come to get this millstone off of my neck.

Before the end of the year, I’ll be closing my public email account and I’ve already switched to two new email services. One will be a strictly private address for good friends and family, only. If I tell you that email address, it’s because I like corresponding with you and I trust you not to give it to anyone else. Not many will ever know that address. I’ll check it a couple of times a day and respond as quickly as possible.

I’ve set up a new business email address and I’m not sure how I’m going to use it yet. One thing I know, I’m never going to make it public, in an effort to avoid the spam harvesters out there and the lowlifes who use them.

I will go through my contact list and I’ll be sending some of you one or both of my new email addresses. Before the end of the year, I’ll change my old address and put an autoresponder on it saying that the account is closed and referring someone to my Contact Us page on AYearFromNow.com.

I’m hoping that this will slow down the torrent of unwanted email to a trickle, but I don’t believe it will stop all the spam.

When I first set up my public email address, it was a real status symbol to have not only your name as a domain, but your name as the email account on that domain. Now, everyone who has thought ahead has their name as a domain, even if they do nothing with it other than to keep it out of the hands of those who would pretend to be someone they aren’t.

I’ll be unsubscribing from all lists and RSS feeds and resubscribing with my new address. I’ll go through the 1,314 online accounts I have and either close them or change my contact address. (Now, you know why it probably won’t get done until near the end of the year.)

I narrowed my focus earlier this year, and I’m going to narrow it again over the next few months.

I may never get all of this back under control, but I intend to do my best.

What about you?

How do you manage your email?

Do you have multiple accounts for different purposes? Do you use one good client and filter incoming email into multiple inboxes based on subject and/or priority?

Do you fight the spam you receive or endure and ignore it?

I’m looking for real advice here.

I’ll continue using Eudora for my business email and I’m using Apple’s Mail program for my private friends and family account. So, don’t suggest that I switch desktop clients. It ain’t agonna happen.

I’ll be using gmail.com as part of my business email solution and another service I won’t mention for my private email.

So, what works for you? Do you have something that works, or are you as overwhelmed as I am right now?

What’s your story?

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , ,

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

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