21st Century Affiliate Marketing

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

This is only tangentially about affiliate marketing, so you may or may not be interested in reading it.

I know of quite a few people who regularly post about how much, or how little, they earn from affiliate marketing, Google Adsense, and other related advertising and marketing methods.

I’m not going to name any names and I’m not trying to embarrass or put anyone down. That’s not at all the point of this post.

What I want to do is to offer an alternative viewpoint, for a change. Maybe you’ll agree, maybe you won’t, but I welcome your comments.

I am not loving affiliate marketing right now.

I’ve stated previously that I live in North Carolina and that Amazon.com dropped me as an affiliate a couple of weeks ago. I’m not going to talk about that here - see my recent posts if you’re interested.

What I am going to talk about is how many people are putting in a lot of work for dismal returns. I’ve done it myself, in some cases.

Yes, the opportunity to earn an excellent income from affiliate marketing exists, but most people do not achieve it. Some people earn tens of thousands of dollars per year, and others earn pocket change.

I’ve been fortunate to do okay with affiliate marketing over the years. I never got rich, but I could pay the bills and afford to stay home and take care of Mom when she needed it.

After she died last November, I’ve been re-evaluating my affiliate marketing business.

For the last six months, I’ve been brainstorming and planning a new set of websites for promoting select local brick and mortar businesses in Murphy, NC.

The cornerstone site will go live this week, but it will take several months of hard work to reach its potential.

I have to thank affiliate marketing for the skills that I’ve learned over the years that will make this new site successful. In some respects I won’t be doing much different than I’ve been doing over the last decade.

However, in one particular respect, it will be very different.

I’m getting paid up front.

For years, I built websites, communities, forums, and blogs to talk about a variety of things, with the goal of monetizing them through potential affiliate marketing commissions.

I did all the work, posted the links, and paid for everything - all for free.

Then, I hoped someone would find the sites, be persuaded that something was what they were looking for, and then purchase through one of my links.

As a result of all this work, I would receive a commission on the sale of the product.

Maybe.

Sometimes.

Not always.

Still, I earned enough to keep going - but I’m a frugal kind of guy.

Earlier this year, I realized that my circumstances had changed. Expenses were going up, income was coming down and that’s never a good pair of trends.

When your outgo exceeds your income,
your upkeep will be your downfall.

I cut my expenses to the bone and started looking for a new business model.

Now, I’m almost ready to go live with the new site.

What is significant is that in the month of June 2009, alone, I earned more from the new site than I did from affiliate marketing for the past several months combined. In fact, if I leave out commission checks from Sitesell for commissions on sales and renewals of Site Build It!, I earned more last month from this new site than I did from affiliate marketing all year.

(Google Adsense ads also played a significant part in my revenue this year, but that’s not affiliate marketing.)

Based on some testing I’ve been doing, I know that I can help these local brick and mortar businesses attract more customers and I’m going to help one of them in each business category. I’m not going to work with national chains or franchises, only with locally owned small businesses.

One of the things that drives our local economy is real estate sales and it is by far the most hotly contested and competitive environment in online marketing for our town.

Last week, I agreed to work with one local real estate agent and I won’t work with any more. Remember, only one business per category.

Some people think I’m cutting my own throat, but I’m pretty sure I know what I’m doing.

Several other business owners signed up, too.

So, with no live site, and working with only a mockup, my new sales rep generated more income in one month than I have from all my other sites combined, some of which have been online for over a decade.

That’s the beauty of getting paid up front.

I don’t know if I’ll abandon affiliate marketing

I haven’t made this decision. I know that I’m dropping underperforming merchants and Amazon.com dropped me. I expect others to drop me because I live in NC.

Depending upon how things go over the next several months, I may decide to concentrate entirely on promoting local businesses in the small mountain town that is near where I live.

There are two thoughts on this.

One: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify your income streams.

Two: put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket! I believe it was Thomas Edison or Andrew Carnegie who gave this advice.

I’m not entirely sure which direction I’ll be going on this.

I’m tired of working for free or nearly nothing

I do know that I’m tired of spending all my time and creative energy working for companies that don’t pay me for the work I’ve done.

Most limit the length of the cookie, the size of the commission, and have all kinds of loopholes to make sure I don’t get paid - and that’s if other affiliates aren’t stealing the commissions that are rightfully mine.

I’m tired of it.

With the single exception of Sitesell. They go out of their way to make sure that anyone who purchases from me remains a lifetime customer and I get paid in the future for every renewal and additional purchase they make.

It is the only affiliate marketing relationship I have that has increased in revenue over the last several years, including this year when I saw dramatic drops in my income since September 2008.

There’s a reason. Whether you like to hear me say it or not, Site Build It! works, when we follow the guidelines and take the time to build our sites properly.

Some say that it’s crazy to pay $300 per year for all that SBI offers when I can put up a WordPress blog for practically nothing. But, I’m disagreeing more and more with this.

That’s why I’m powering this new site with Site Build It!

It offers everything I need at a very reasonable price of less than a dollar per day.

You see, I intend to build a real business, not a hobby.

And, to do that, I’m going to help other real businesses attract new customers, bring back existing customers, and earn more money.

In the long-run, what they pay me will be a bargain.

And, to top it off, without even having a website yet, while working from a mockup I created, my new sales rep was able to generate more than enough income in June, alone, to pay for a subscription to Site Build It! several times over.

I don’t give actual numbers for my traffic or income, so don’t bother to ask. That’s between nobody but me and the IRS.

Will it work?

Only time will tell.

I’ll go live with the site this week, but it will take several months of hard work to make it - and the offline marketing that will go along with it - as successful as I’m hoping it will become.

I’m confident, however, that this is going to be effective and that we’ll have local business owners happy to renew over and over again. I’m looking for long-term relationships with them that build over the years, and I’m going to do everything in my power to make it happen.

I’ve learned something very important from Ken Evoy. Plan your business and then implement it over time. Always under-promise and over-deliver.

This is the very opposite of all the breathless, excited hype that is all-too-prevalent in many areas of Internet marketing.

What’s the future of this blog?

I don’t know.

It’s not looking very bright, though. And neither is the future of several other blogs and websites that are devoted to my affiliate marketing business. I already know that several will be shut down as soon as I can get to it, because it isn’t worth the time and effort to repurpose them.

This blog may survive, but only time will tell.

What do you think?

Is affiliate marketing going to play a big part in your business plans for the rest of this year and into 2010?

Do you feel like you’re getting adequate compensation for the work you put into it?

Act on your dream!

JD

In the last couple of days, I’ve gotten a couple of emails from friends asking if I’m okay. They said I hadn’t posted to this blog in awhile and wondered if anything was wrong.

The truth is that I have not been feeling very well, but that wasn’t why I didn’t write anything lately.

Sometimes I just don’t have anything to say, so I don’t post anything.

I know some people think that is the kiss of death for a blog, but I’d rather read something substantive rather than just filler, any time.

The truth is, however, that I’ve been working on my offline marketing and planning a new site for joint venture co-marketing between brick and mortar businesses in Murphy, NC.

I’ve been meeting with a number of business owners and talking to them about their marketing and what they want to do with their businesses this year.

Each business owner is different and I’m surprised at the number of different things they want to accomplish.

So, I’ve spent a lot of time talking, listening, and then going back home and doing a lot of thinking and planning.

It has taken a lot of work, but now I have a design for a new business model that I think will work for all of the business owners who choose to participate.

One of the beauties of the new model is that it requires cooperation among the owners in cross promoting each other, both online and offline. I think that will help all of us to do better, even in the tough economy we’re currently facing.

All of this behind the scenes work will result in much more online work over the coming months, but you won’t necessarily see much of it on this blog.

Affiliate marketing will play little part in the new site I’m developing, because it will be devoted mainly to sending new customers to existing offline businesses and reminding their current customers and clients why they like the business and why there are good reasons for going back and buying more.

Still, I’ll be using a lot of the techniques that I’ve learned through affiliate marketing.

I’ll be working with all my new clients to build individual email marketing lists for their businesses as well as building an inclusive mailing list for the benefit of all the business owners who choose to join us. Of course, I’ll be using Aweber to manage these individual lists and the new site will be powered by Site Build It!, where the new list will be powered by SBI’s ezine/newsletter module.

So, there has been a lot of thinking, scratching my head, drinking coffee, and scribbling on hundreds of sheets of paper. I’m sure you didn’t want to hear about that and I know you didn’t want to see any of it.

Eventually, hopefully in a month or so, I’ll be able to introduce the new site and do much more local marketing than I’ve been able to do over the last few years.

It’s been strange getting out of the house and actually talking to real business owners, but I’ve been enjoying it immensely.

With affiliate marketing, I rarely know who my customers are, how they found me, or why they decided to purchase.

With this local marketing consulting and new business system, I think it’s going to be fun getting to know our customers and helping the business owners effectively spread the news about why they are the best source for what they’re offering in our tiny little town in the mountains of western NC.

One of the difficult decisions I had to make was to limit my clients to non-competing business categories, which has turned out to be a good idea. Rather than trying to promote all the real estate agents in town, for example, I can concentrate on working with just one. That will make it much easier to write quality content for the new site and will help me focus on what I’m trying to accomplish.

I also decided that each client I accept has to be actively involved in their own marketing and must agree to recommend at least two other non-competing businesses for whom they will write testimonials that will be used on several other sites.

I’m finding it refreshing to work with people who want to work together in real life, and still build their own individual businesses.

It’s going to take some time to pull all of this together, but I expect it to be off and running by late summer.

We’ll see if this is a good prediction or not.

So, if all you are interested in is affiliate marketing, you’ll see that I really had nothing to say about that topic.

I’m alive and working and I’ll be writing more about affiliate marketing soon.

Act on your dream!

JD

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I am always looking for others in my area who are using Twitter and other social networking tools.

There aren’t many people in Murphy, NC who use the service, but a few more are coming online every month.

Today, I found a new tool at ChirpCity.com that helps find other local Twitterers.

Here’s the ChirpCity page for Murphy, NC. I found a few new people to follow there. I’ve bookmarked this page and will revisit it regularly.

If you see this and you are interested in Murphy, NC, you are invited to join us at our new Murphy, NC online community.

Act on your dream!

JD

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If you’ve been reading this blog for any time, you know that I’ve been struggling with my blogs and websites and how I’m going to focus my efforts more in 2009.

You’ve also noted, I suspect, that some of the posts I have here don’t really relate to affiliate marketing.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve created a new blog and resurrected another one, and now I have my three primary blogs set up for real work. There are a few more things I need to do, but they are ready to go.

21st Century Affiliate Marketing

This blog will be focused more tightly on affiliate marketing. I won’t be talking as much about Twitter tools, social networking, and similar topics, unless they can be tied directly to being a more effective affiliate marketer.

John Dilbeck And Friends

I’ve moved my John Dilbeck And Friends blog from it’s former home at johndilbeck.editthispage.com to it’s new home at JohnDilbeckAndFriends.com and now it is powered by WordPress.

This is the blog where I’ll be talking about social networking and other things in which I’m interested. It will be a general purpose blog, but I don’t plan on talking about politics or what I had for breakfast!

Murphy, NC 28906

Finally, I’ve resurrected my Murphy NC 28906 blog, updated it to WordPress version 2.7, changed the theme, and added some bells and whistles. It will be used exclusively for talking about people, events, organizations, businesses, and things related specifically to Murphy, NC.

Because of more pressing issues, I neglected that blog for most of 2008, but it will be much more important to me in 2009 and in future years.

Before too long, I’ll be reintroducing my Murphy NC community and a announcing a brand-new website for promoting local businesses on the Internet.

More focused on my two primary goals in 2009

With these changes, I think I’ll be able to segment my efforts and focus on my two primary goals for 2009:

1. Continuing to build my affiliate marketing business and making it more profitable.

2. Promoting local brick and mortar businesses in Murphy, NC. I’ll also be doing much more offline marketing consulting with local business owners.

I hope this will make this blog more interesting to those of you who are interested in affiliate marketing.

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

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2.9

During this time between Christmas and the new year, I’m doing a lot of thinking about what I plan to accomplish in 2009.

I am narrowing my focus and will be concentrating on just two areas: 1. affiliate marketing and 2. promoting businesses in Murphy, NC.

That means I will stop doing many of the things I’ve been doing. I’ll stop blogging on a lot of different topics and I’ll close down blogs and websites in January that are not related to my two primary areas of interest.

It also means that I’m going to be much more active in my community than I’ve been able to be for the last several years - both online and offline. Yes, that means that I’m actually going to leave my cave and talk to real people in the real world, again.

I really love living near Murphy, NC. I love the people, the small town atmosphere, the scenery, and being away from the big cities.

I don’t like how hard it can be to meet new people and to earn a living here. Sometimes, I think the two go hand in hand. In order to earn a living, perhaps new people in our area need a way to tap into the changing social networks and to make friends with people who know where the jobs are and can hire them.

Today, I was reading an interesting article at SocialMediaToday.com, How Small Towns are Social Networks, and it sparked some ideas I wanted to share with the author.

I agree with her observation that small towns are social networks and the photo of the bulletin board with all the business cards reminds me of several similar boards in Murphy.

I was wondering how one can best combine the offline networks of bulletin boards and newspapers with the online networks of Twitter, Facebook, and local portals and forums.

If the businesses are mostly promoting offline and the potential customers and employees are increasingly going online, how do we combine these networks so that it is easy to connect and to get to know each other?

Maybe I’m a bit uncommon as compared to most of the people here in western North Carolina. Instead of reaching for the yellow pages to find a phone number, I search on Google. Only if I can’t find what I’m looking for online would I consider going offline.

Yet, I believe most of the people in this area approach this type of information gathering first from the offline world, and many of them never go online for local searching.

I don’t have any data to back this up, it’s just a feeling from having talked to people.

With the price of offline advertising going up and online advertising going down, how long will it be before the businesses bring most of their marketing activities online?

How long will it be before the residents of Cherokee County take their local information gathering activities online, primarily?

How can I position myself and my services to help put these two groups together so we can all benefit?

As I said, I had some ideas I wanted to share with the author of the blog I was reading, so I was ready to comment and saw the following: “To Comment on this post, you must first register. Click here”

Sigh…

I really had something I wanted to say, so I registered, something I am doing much less of now than I used to do.

Over an hour later, I’m still waiting for the authentication email so I can post my comment, and you know what? I’ve lost interest. Even if I get the email now, I won’t bother activating my account just to post a comment.

Yes, I was a hot prospect then, but I’ve gone completely cold, now.

I even clicked on the link to the original post, but it, too, requires registration. That link takes me to Reddit, and that’s not what I’m looking for. I want a way to contact her directly.

Wait a second, that’s not accurate. Over an hour ago, I wanted a way to contact her directly and carry on the conversation. Now, not so much.

No more. I’m no longer interested.

I think back to just a few months ago when I changed my primary blog to this one with the main goal of making it easier for my friends and visitors to join in the conversations by commenting. It is working out very well, and I’m making friends with fellow bloggers around the world.

I would have enjoyed exchanging ideas with the author of the article I mentioned, but I can’t even see her profile without registering.

To top it off, there are links to the Twitter profiles of three people in the article who are referenced only indirectly, but there is no link to her Twitter profile that I can see. I did a search on Google, and I think I found her Twitter profile, but the photo is different and I’m not sure it’s her.

So, while she makes some good points about social networking, the way I found her has been time-consuming and frustrating.

It turns out that I followed the URL on her Twitter profile to her website and confirmed that she was the author of the article. To her credit, her own blog has links to her email address, Twitter profile, and Skype accounts. Not only that, but the article makes it easy to comment and she even uses CommentLuv. See it here: How Small Towns are Social Networks

Had I found the article on her actual blog instead of a syndicated version of it on SocialMediaToday.com, I would have been much more likely to have joined in the conversation and I would not have felt so frustrated trying to find a way to communicate with her.

Now, I’ve opened up at least one door by following her on Twitter.

Perhaps I’ll even find the motivation to share my thoughts with her on her blog - if I can remember what they were.

In the long run, what will I remember about this experience? Will it be her insights on local networking or will it be the frustration of trying to communicate?

So, how does this apply to affiliate marketing?

What are you doing to make it easy to establish conversations with your visitors? How well is it working?

Maybe you are doing a good job of conversing on your blog, but what happens when your content is syndicated elsewhere? Are roadblocks thrown up needlessly? Why? What can you do about them?

If you recommend a product or service as an affiliate, do you make it easy for prospects to contact you to gather further information or to clarify any points you’ve made?

Do you respond to those requests in a timely manner? Do you provide additional information? Do you answer the specific questions that are asked?

In my opinion, the main point of having a blog is to start a conversation.

What are you doing to make it easier for your reader to respond to you?

What are you doing to make it more difficult?

Are you even aware of things that may make it more difficult?

Truly, I don’t want to pick on her, because she’s doing the right things on her own blog. Still, I found her article on another site that is syndicating her content, and finding a way to join in the conversation was difficult and time-consuming.

Is that her fault, or is it the fault of the site that syndicated her article?

I don’t see it as her fault, at all. It seems to me to be the unintended consequences of social networking extending our reach to other sites that may not make it so easy to participate as our own sites do.

In the long run, it will probably be worth an hour of frustration, because I found someone who shares some of the same interests I do. Now that I’ve found her blog, and just now subscribed to it, I’ll look forward to reading what she has to say, and it will be easy, then, to join in the conversation, should I want.

I’m going to take a short break and see if I can work up the enthusiasm I originally had to join her conversation, now that I’ve found it.

Act on your dream!

JD

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