Making progress by going backwards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progress is not a continuous upwards curve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What part will affiliate marketing play in my future?

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

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

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

What do you think?

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

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

Act on your dream!

JD

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Why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

June 9, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 32 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, Marketing, Sitesell and Site Build It, Success and Failure, Websites, WordPress 

I just read an interesting story in the New York Times…

Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest

This is another article that shows how easy it is to start a blog, but how hard it is to continue it over time. Things change. We lose interest. We become too busy with other things.

In many cases, we become disillusioned by the lack of success we had originally imagined.

Although the same can be true for a traditional website, the difference lies in the amount of traffic that continues when we are busy doing something else.

I have static websites that continue to bring in thousands of readers every month, even when I do nothing to them for extended periods.

The same just is not true for my blogs.

If I go any length of time without posting something new to a blog, regular readers notice and new readers may perceive it as just another abandoned blog.

I know I feel that way when I visit a blog that hasn’t been updated recently. Do you?

But, and I think this is important, I just don’t feel that way when I go to a traditional website. While on one of them, I’m looking for information, not necessarily the latest thing written.

As you know, I’ve been debating the issue of blogging or building traditional multi-tier websites for some time…

Site Build It! or WordPress? Which is Best? Why?

I think both have promise and I can argue both in favor and against both of them.

It is much more difficult to design and build a multi-tier website that presents information in a way that is easy to navigate and update. I know, because I’ve been spending much of my time every day for the last few weeks designing a new website.

On the other hand, I can throw up a blog in a couple of hours. All I need is an inspiration, a topic, and a little free time. I know this, because I’ve started several dozen blogs, but now I’m maintaining only three of them on a semi-regular basis, and updating a few others sporadically.

When looking at the traffic stats for all my sites, I see a definite correlation between frequency of posting on a blog that just does not exist on my traditional websites. Just as in academia, with blogs you have to think publish or perish.

Easy to start – easy to abandon

The longer I do all of this, the more I realize that blogs are easy to start. There’s very little barrier to entry. Start one free on Blogger in ten minutes. Host one on your own domain using WordPress in a couple of hours (plus whatever time it takes the domain to propagate, if it’s newly registered). Cost, little to nothing.

On the other hand, when I start a new website, it’s not so easy to start. There’s planning time that nobody but me sees. I may spend months working on the design, researching keywords, researching the competition, deciding on how much information is needed to make the site viable, and designing a three- or four-tier site structure. All of this is done before I do anything else.

I may register the domain in advance, just to make sure it will be available when I want it, or I may decide upon the domain name after I know what’s going to be on the site.

How much does it cost to host one of these websites?

If I go with traditional hosting on a Linux server, my cost is nothing. I’m already paying that cost for my other sites and have both the bandwidth and storage available to host several more domains.

If I go with Site Build It!, the up-front cost will be $300 and that pays for the first year of hosting. More and more, I’m finding that I’m not interested in building a site that isn’t powered by SBI, but I’m going to leave that for another discussion.

Getting back to the main point…

With the new site I’ll be introducing in a few more weeks, I’ve already put months into getting ready for it. I paid $10 to reserve the domain name, and I’ll be paying another $300 to host it. That’s a pretty large barrier to entry from my point of view.

It’s also one thing that will keep me motivated to continue developing the site. After all that time, work, and money, I’m not going to stop working on it until it is profitable and I’m getting income on a regular basis from it.

With a new blog, I find that I’m more of the opinion of easy come, easy go. When I abandon a blog, it’s no great loss.

But, there really is a loss. I’ll lose the time I put into building it, and in the long run that’s more valuable than any money I may have invested or not. I can recover money or earn more. I can never get back the time I lost.

When I first started debating this with myself, I was clearly in favor of blogging with WordPress over building a multi-tier website. I just seemed to make more sense.

Now, however, as I spend more time doing both and look back on the results of what I’ve gotten from each, I’m leaning much farther away from blogging and towards a content-rich, structured website.

I almost hate to admit it, because I disagreed with him when he originally wrote it, but I am more and more coming to agree with Ken Evoy and what he wrote about this subject: Blog or Build?

Finally, I’m going to disagree with some of my good friends, including Mitch Mitchell and Aussie Sire. I respect their opinions and truly enjoy interacting with them on our blogs.

What do I disagree with?

I’m finding that the number of comments or the length of the discussion on a blog post has almost no correlation with income.

Yet, it takes time to monitor the comments and respond to them, so there is a cost involved without a commensurate income to offset the effort.

That doesn’t mean that I’ll discontinue comments or discussions here. I won’t. But, I’m realizing that I’m doing it more for the enjoyment, debate, and socializing, rather than for generating income.

I earn far more from my traditional sites, and after their original design and building, I spend much less time maintaining them.

The choice is becoming more clear all the time.

I’m not trying to change your mind, I’m just passing along what I’m learning on this topic.

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Are you chasing your tail?

December 12, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 18 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Marketing, Poll, Success and Failure 

Introduction: The purpose of this post is to get all of us thinking about what we’re doing to build our businesses and what we’re doing that is just a complete waste of time. Caution, this post rambles even more than most of the other things I write. I want to solicit your opinions and hear about your experiences. I’ll ask more questions than I’ll answer. I hope you’ll think seriously about the questions I raise and join the conversation.

Now, on to the questions of the day…

If you look back on the last year – assuming you’ve been building your online business that long – have you been making progress or just chasing your tail?

You know what I mean.

We all love to watch a kitten or puppy chase its tail and run in circles until it falls over. It’s entertaining. It’s amusing. To us.

To the kitten or puppy, it’s frustrating.

If they don’t catch their tail, they get tired and quit. If they do catch it, they learn not to bite so hard the next time.

You’ve seen this and laughed. If not, do a search on YouTube. I’m sure you’ll find many hours of interesting pet videos that illustrate the point I’m making.

In fact, the very act of searching on YouTube and watching these videos is a good example of chasing your own tail. After spending minutes, or hours, doing this, what do you have to show for your time and effort? Not much.

The same principle applies to building your home business.

Are you making progress, or are you simply chasing your tail?

Are you running off, hither and yon, looking for the secret to Internet marketing success? How many websites have you visited? How many newsletters have you subscribed to? How many gurus have you followed? How many ebooks have you bought and downloaded? How many of those ebooks have you read? How many affiliate marketing programs have you joined? How many social networks have you joined? How often do you tweet on Twitter? How many friends are you trying to keep up with? How much email have you read?

Or, are you spending your time developing and promoting your marketing business?

If you’ve done your basic homework, you probably already know all you need to know to begin building your online business. There are no secrets. Much of what you need to know is available to you for free. For example, read Ken Evoy’s free ebooks, the Affiliate Masters Course or his best selling Make Your Site Sell!, which is now free to download.

But, if you don’t plan to study those books – or whatever guides you prefer – and put into action what you learn, what’s the point? If you don’t learn and act on what you learn, you’ll never build a business, no matter how busy you are.

Are you building your business or are you simply chasing your tail?

If you intend to earn a living from marketing, don’t you think it is time to learn how to build a marketing system that will work for you? A system that will help you focus on what works best and do more of it?

There are so many distractions and so many things are promoted as the best way to become successful with your online business, but most of them don’t work for most of us.

How do we stop chasing our tail and focus on what works best when we don’t yet know what works best for us?

It is especially frustrating when what works well for me may not work well for you, and vice versa.

Still, there have to be some basic marketing fundamentals that will apply to all of us, don’t you think?

Which is better? (A) Posting free classified ads on a dozen sites or (B) building your own focused marketing blog or website?

Which is better? (A) making 100 Squidoo lenses on assorted topics or (B) making 100 Squidoo lenses on different topics related to your marketing niche?

Which is better? (A) promoting a hundred different products and services or (B) promoting the top ten products for your particular niche?

Which is better? (A) talking about everything you think about or (B) focusing on your particular niche and branding yourself so others will think of you when that topic comes to mind?

Which is better? (A) promoting hither and yon hoping for one-time sales or (B) building a marketing funnel (or funnels) for your business and each of the products and services you recommend to your readers?

Which is better? (A) spending hours a day clicking on a traffic exchange or (B) spending a few days creating a new marketing funnel for a particular product, including writing a benefits-laden report about the product, creating an autoresponder series for it, writing a page about it on your website, blogging about it, creating a Squidoo lens about it, tweeting about it, and promoting everywhere that is appropriate, with the goal to get your readers to join your list and download the report you wrote.

I’m asking these questions just to get you to think about this. There are no right or wrong answers. Well, maybe some choices are more right than others, especially if you’re serious about building your online affiliate marketing business.

What do you want to accomplish at the end of the day, week, month, or next year? Do you want lots of visitors to your sites? Do you want good ratings on your lenses? Do you want lots of comments on your blog posts? Do you want lots of people to subscribe to your list(s) and download your report(s)? Do you want larger commission checks every month? What do you want to accomplish with the time, effort, and money you invest into your business?

Are you just chasing your own tail?

I’ve done a lot of that and I’m starting to realize how much time I’ve wasted, and time is much more valuable than money.

What do you want to earn as payment for the effort you put into your marketing efforts? Enough for a movie and dinner? Maybe make a car payment? Pay your rent or mortgage every month? Earn enough to quit your job? Build a business that enables you to thrive and not just survive? What is your time and effort worth?

I hope this post sparks a good conversation. What are we doing that gets us nowhere and how can we substitute better methods to build our businesses?

I know which way I’ll be going in 2009. Have you thought about what you are going to do?

What do you think will work best – for you – in 2009 as you work hard to define your niche, target your best customers, promote the best products and services they need, and increase your revenue?

I’m all ears.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Thoughts about SFI Marketing Group

August 30, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 15 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Network Marketing, SFI Marketing Group, Sitesell and Site Build It, Success and Failure 

I’ve been a member of SFI Marketing Group for over five years and, in general, I have very positive thoughts about, and experiences with, this company.

I believe it is one of the very best companies for people who are brand new to affiliate marketing to learn how to promote online. They offer lots of training and good support. There is an active forum for members.

I am not a fan of multi-level marketing

One thing I don’t like about SFI is that it is a multi-level marketing (also known as mlm or networking marketing) company. I am not a fan of mlm, even though I’ve had good results with SFI.

Why?

Because, I’m tired of sponsoring people into the company who then do nothing, including replying to a simple email welcoming them to the company.

On the other hand, I’m happy to meet new people who have joined in my downline and I’m always happy to answer questions and offer advice based on my experience. That’s more than I can say for my sponsor, who has never replied to any emails I’ve sent him.

In theory, multi-level marketing makes a lot of sense. The opportunity to leverage income and efforts by enlisting others into your marketing team is very attractive. Some people seem to do well with this, but, in actual practice, most do not.

You can learn more by downloading Ann Sieg’s free ebook: The 7 Great Lies of Network Marketing.

What I like about SFI

What I like about SFI is the ability to earn commissions for selling their products and services at retail. I think their line of non-toxic, natural cleaners are the best I’ve used and I’m happy to have alternatives to the chemical-soup cleaners available elsewhere.

I enjoy getting that email that tells me I’ve made a sale. SFI is generous in their commissions, and I’m happy to get my monthly commission check.

I also like the fact that Gery Carson, president of SFI, is always working to find new ways for us to earn money by promoting an array of products and services. He’s a very innovative person and regularly responds to questions on the company forum.

What I don’t like about SFI

Unfortunately, the list of things I dislike about SFI is growing faster and longer than the list of things I do like.

For example, I really like the non-toxic, natural cleaners, as I mentioned above. What I don’t like is that there is no way to market them right now, and it’s been several months since I was able to do so.

Well, that’s not exactly true, but the explanation is rather confusing.

I can still offer you the opportunity to buy the non-toxic all natural cleaner by linking to the old Veriuni store. I still have links to this store on a number of my sites.

(Update August 2009: Affiliate link removed, as I no longer promote SFI Marketing Group.)

However, new affiliates don’t learn about this, because the training – as far as I can tell – no longer informs them about the Veriuni store.

There used to be a simple gateway page that affiliates could direct you to if you wanted to purchase the natural cleaners, but it no longer is available.

Here’s an example of a simple gateway page that links to the Veriuni Liquid Nutrition product and another one that links to the International Association of Home Business Entrepreneurs.

(Update August 2009: Affiliate links removed, as I no longer promote SFI Marketing Group.)

Why is this important?

The great majority of new affiliates joining SFI have no experience in marketing online. Therefore, it makes it much easier to promote something if they can send visitors to well-written, easy-to-understand gateway pages and make some sales as a result.

The whole point in joining SFI is to make more money than you spend. Right?

We’re here to earn a profit.

Now, I want to emphasize that you can remain an affiliate of SFI as long as you want and never spend a dime. A lot of people don’t understand that. As a free affiliate, you can still earn a very nice commission for any sales you make, and these commissions are several times as much as you would earn if you sold something through your Amazon.com store, for instance.

As a free affiliate at SFI, if you sell any consumer goods to someone who is not an SFI affiliate and doesn’t live at the same address as an SFI affiliate, you’ll earn 30% of the commission volume (CV). Let’s use the All-Purpose Cleaner as an example…

All-Purpose Cleaner costs $9.85 per quart with a CV of $2.21.

A free affiliate would earn 30% of this $2.21 for each sale, which amounts to $0.66. Now, I know that’s not a lot of income, but it grows as you sell more product.

An Executive Affiliate (EA) would earn 60% of the CV, or $1.32. To become an EA, you either need to sell retail products that add up to 10 SVP or more. (I won’t go into SVP at this time.) The other way is to purchase products with 10 SVP or more every month.

A Team Leader would earn 80% of the CV, or $1.77 per sale.

It’s not much earning less than a dollar or two, but this amount can grow rapidly as you do a better job of making retail sales.

As with every other sales and marketing job where you’re working on commission, the more you sell the more you earn.

The main point I’m trying to make is that SFI isn’t making it easy for us to sell things. While many gateway pages remain, some of the products I want to sell no longer have an easy way to link to a sales page, especially if I don’t know how to link to the Veriuni store.

A marketing organization lives and dies based on selling things. We earn our commissions based on how much we sell every month.

Let me give you another example.

I am a happy member of the International Association of Home Business Entrepreneurs and SFI offers a good gateway page for recommending it to you and others. Even if I weren’t an SFI affiliate, I would continue my IAHBE membership because I get more from it most months than I pay to be a member.

Now, let’s look at IAHBE from the perspective of an SFI affiliate…

As a free member, I would earn 30% of the Commission Volume (CV) of $19.00, which equals $5.70.

An EA earns 60% of the CV, or $11.40.

A TL earns 80% of the CV, or $15.20.

These amounts are for selling an IAHBE membership to someone who is not an SFI affiliate. The amounts you earn if someone in your downline joins IAHBE are less than these numbers.

Now, what gets interesting is that these are not one-time commissions. They are recurring commissions that you’ll earn every month that someone remains a member.

So, as a Bronze Team Leader, I’ll earn $15.20 every month that someone who is not an SFI affiliate remains a member, if they originally joined from one of my links.

It doesn’t take many of these to start earning some decent commissions.

At least, in theory.

In practice, I haven’t sold any IAHBE memberships to someone who is not an SFI affiliate. Several of the people in my downline have joined IAHBE and I earn some from that, as well as advancing in the leadership ranks, but it’s not as much as I would earn if I were selling these memberships to non-affiliates.

I think IAHBE is a good deal, but apparently the hundreds of people who have followed my links to the gateway page don’t agree.

SFI has been inconsistent

Lately, SFI has been advancing and retreating in about equal amounts.

Nice Offers discount coupon program suspended

A few months ago, SFI suspended the NiceOffers program and I had been working on promoting that with some diligence. I had created three blogs and almost 50 Squidoo lenses to help promote the NiceOffers program and the merchants who were offering discount coupons through the service.

I was syndicating my blog feeds on a variety of websites and I probably haven’t found and deleted all of them, even after a few months.

OK. I recognize that everything we try doesn’t succeed. So, suspending something that wasn’t working as expected makes good business sense, even though it impacted my efforts negatively.

Still, to do so suddenly after making it one of the primary marketing efforts of SFI came as a jar and I was very disappointed as a result.

Closing the Merchant Service program

This morning, I found this on the SFI forum:

Effective 8/28/08, the Merchant Services program has been discontinued due to continuing issues with the third-party company on which the program was based and over which we have no control. We apologize for any inconvenience the termination of this program may cause.

I have been watching this program for some time, and while it was very attractive, I was aware that there were problems with it, so I wasn’t actively promoting it, even though the commissions could have been very lucrative.

Now, I’m sure that a lot of affiliates are very disappointed about this.

It takes money, effort, and time to market something, especially when there are so many competitors. After spending months trying to build this part of your business, you have to be disheartened to hear that your efforts have been wasted.

The worst part of this is that we, the affiliates, are taking the risk in advertising and promoting these other companies. It costs money and time to promote through affiliate marketing, and we only realize an income when we make sales. If the merchants, both SFI and the third-party company they mention, fail in their part of closing the sale, then we are very negatively impacted.

New products that I don’t plan to promote

Recently, SFI introduced IAB Benefits which apparently offers health, dental, medical, and other services.

Even after reading all I could find about it, several times, I still don’t understand this company and what it offers. I’m a fairly bright person, but I’m still confused.

Before SFI affiliates began promoting it, when I searched for “IAB Benefits” on Google, I found more complaints than good reports about it. Are the complaints valid? I don’t know, but I don’t like promoting anything when complaints are so visible.

IAB may be a very good company that offers great products, but if I don’t understand it, I’m not going to promote it – no matter how lucrative the compensation plan may be.

I don’t want to mislead someone who is looking for medical insurance and who may sign up for IAB Benefits by mistake. Some of us just don’t have any money to waste, and from what I was able to learn, IAB Benefits doesn’t do what I would expect if I wanted medical insurance.

The SFIMG website logs me out while I am working on it

I was just reminded how much I dislike it when I’m researching something on the SFIMG.com website and it logs me out. I just had five pages open on the site and now I get a session expired message on each of them. When I log back in, does it take me to the page I was on? No. Now, I have to waste the next few minutes navigating back to where I was.

Sigh…

The not-quite-ready ecommerce store

We’ve been hearing since early spring that SFI will be introducing a new ecommerce store that will make it easy for us to earn higher commissions. A few months ago, I was excited about this, but I’m starting to lose interest.

Will this store do everything that is projected?

I hope so, but with a schedule that keeps slipping, I’m inclined to believe that it is more difficult to create than was originally projected or that there are problems with the programming and implementation.

I don’t know either way, but my gut is telling me to be careful about this one.

Here’s the latest update, posted by Gery Carson on August 29, 2008:

More new store features revealed:

For our many affiliates anxiously awaiting the unveiling of the new SFI store (and for brand new affiliates who may not have heard about the coming new store), here’s an update of some of the exciting features everyone will be enjoying soon:

• ONE store for everything. The new store will service both SFI affiliates and retail customers alike. Everything from nutritional products to Internet services to SFI promotional materials.

• Thousands (soon tens of thousands) of new products in dozens of new categories, plus closeouts, collectables and hard-to-find items available nowhere else.

• Earn instant SVP on EVERY product in the store…including all SFI promotional materials like X-Cards, postcards, business cards, etc.

• Exclusive, money-saving daily deals (“Deal Of The Day”).

• Special weekly/monthly sales with special discount prices.

• New products added daily.

• You can promote the store as a whole, or any individual product in the store, or any department, or any selection of products of your choosing.

• No longer do high shipping costs need to get in the way of becoming EA or making sales internationally. This is because the new SFI store will be utilizing new partner companies who will be shipping to you directly from outlets around the world. Additionally, through the store’s Private Seller program, you can locate sellers and products located in your same country—even the same city!

• Because of how it’s being built, virtually anything can be added and sold in the store. Goods, services, downloadable software and media, you name it! The sky’s the limit!

• The new SFI store also allows you to sell YOUR stuff. Through the new store’s Private Seller program you can quickly, easily, and cheaply convert stuff you no longer want or need…into stuff you do! List your stuff at the new store, and sell for cash….or for any product in the store. You can even earn EA status each month selling unwanted items around your house! Use the new SFI store as your online garage sale to clean out your closets, attics and garages! List and sell dozens or even hundreds of miscellaneous items easily.

• Hot, new marketing program will allow you to easily generate lifetime retail customers by the hundreds! And earning EA status though retail sales will have never been simpler or easier!

• Standing Orders, on thousands of products, will be available both to affiliates AND retail customers. When an affiliate or customer places an order containing any Standing Order-Eligible product, they’ll automatically be alerted how to set up a Standing Order for that item in seconds.

• More payment options.

• Product shipment tracking.

• Express Checkout feature allows you to make purchases in seconds.

• Wishlists

• Store multiple shipping addresses and multiple payment methods –which can be instantly accessed via pulldown menus during checkout.

• Seamless integration with VeryVIP. If you are a VeryVIP subscriber, you’ll have powerful additional tools to promote the new store and generate customers.

• One-click sitewide currency conversions for 17 major world currencies.

These are just SOME of the amazing features the new SFI store will come with. And there are many, many, many more. Not only that, the new store is also going to usher in some powerful new enhancements to the overall SFI program including substantial simplification, bigger bonuses, and more incentives to become and remain an EA.

Stay tuned for further details!

Several people posted some replies to the announcement, and Gery responded with the following post this morning, August 30, 2008:

Good morning,

I’d like to address some of the comments in this thread:

1. My apologies if you’ve perceived our launch date estimates published to date to have been “evasive.” This was certainly not our intent. These are the facts: Since beginning this project several months ago, the scope has grown enormously. What started as “just a new e-commerce store” has become something that will be seamlessly integrated directly or indirectly into every aspect of SFI. And what’s key here is that doing so closes a number of “holes” in the overall SFI program.

That is to say that we expect this project to have potentially explosive positive impacts on registrations, opt-in rates, shipping costs, EA upgrades, and much more. All those things you’ve been wanting to see out of SFI…we believe are now within our reach…thanks to this project.

Of course, making all this goodness happen has added some time to the project. And, yes, we definitely want to have everything significantly tested before we launch so that the growth explosion we anticipate can begin immediately upon the launch. We sincerely appreciate everyone’s patience; when we launch I am 1000% certain you will agree that it was worth the wait.

2. So when WILL the new store launch? There is still MUCH to do and it’s impossible to foresee every potential “speedbump” that could come up between now and the launch date as it’s not only our editors, designers and programmers involved, but also other software companies, banks, payment processors, shipping companies, etc. Therefore, it would not be wise for me to give out an exact date. There are just simply too many things that COULD cause us to miss the date. My hope is that we can unveil everything on November 1st, but that is only an estimate and could change. I’m sorry, but that’s the best I can do at this time.

3. At least one person in this thread has envisioned a “sky is falling” scenario based on some recent SFI events. What I will say to this is that there are many pieces to the puzzle of what we are putting together. What may look like negatives now aren’t necessarily so, but rather moves and pieces of the bigger puzzle that will be come clear to you after the launch.

Also, for the record, companywide, SFI continues to steadily grow. We have now seen nearly two years of continual monthly growth. Total EAs have nearly doubled in the last two years and we are up, up, up in virtually every key category. So you can imagine why I can hardly sleep at night thinking about what we’re going to see in these numbers later this year after the new store has arrived!!

So, have faith, the future for SFI affiliates is brighter than it’s ever been.

Thanks, everyone! I hope I’ve helped with your concerns.

Gery Carson
SFI President & Founder

Benefit of the doubt

I’ve been reading what Gery Carson has to say for the last five years and I’ve never known him to mislead his affiliates. I’ve watched him introduce innovative products, marketing methods, and compensation plans to adapt to a changing world.

So, I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt in regards to the new ecommerce store.

I certainly don’t have any secret information or behind-the-scenes insight into all that is being done to make this a reality.

Part of me want to just throw my hands up and quit.

This has been a very rough month for me personally and I’m not feeling very enthusiastic about anything at the moment, so I’m not going to make any big decisions until I’m feeling better.

I recognize the part of me that wants to quit, and I tend not to pay very much attention to him. He’s a whiner and can always find the gray cloud behind every silver lining. He’s a manifestation of all the naysayers and doubters I’ve encountered who tell me things won’t work and who think I’m crazy for even trying.

I’m sure you’ve heard the stories of people who quit just before they would have succeeded.

Napoleon Hill, in his best-selling book, Think and Grow Rich, tells a story about R. U. Darby, who quit three feet from finding his fortune. He quit mining for gold when the vein ran out and he sold everything to the junk man, who hired a mining engineer to study the mine. He predicted that the vein had shifted just three feet because of a fault. The new owner ordered his employees to dig to where the engineer predicted the vein would be, and that’s where they found the gold. The junk man continued to mine gold from that vein for years and earned millions of dollars because he sought expert advice before quitting.

Russell Conwell, the founder of Temple University, tells the story in his Acres of Diamonds lecture, “about a man who wanted to find diamonds so badly that he sold his property and went off in futile search for them; the new owner of his home discovered that a rich diamond mine was located right there on the property.”

While that tells the basics of the lecture, I urge you to click the link and read the entire Acres of Diamonds lecture for yourself.

Sometimes we’d do much better by doing a little more digging, learning a bit more, and digging in our own back yard before quitting and moving on to something new.

I’ll wait and see

As I have said before, I earn a commission from SFI every month and it’s usually profitable for me to promote SFI, so I don’t want to cut off an income stream unless it becomes necessary.

But, I don’t want to just keep on going indefinitely as I wait for a higher income from SFI, as I should be receiving after 5 years of effort.

Most months, I spend about the same time, effort, and money promoting Gery Carson’s SFI Marketing Group as I do Ken Evoy’s Site Build It!

I earn higher commissions and true, recurring, residual income from promoting Site Build It! and I’m seeing a nice upwards trend in my income from them. On top of that, I’m a happy SBI customer and, a couple of days ago, I renewed my subscription for my SBI-powered Act On Your Dream! site. I never once questioned my decision to renew that subscription and I did it about six weeks before it was due.

So, it’s interesting to compare my relatively-flat income from SFI to my growing income from SBI.

I’m going to give SFI almost one more year. If the new store is released and performs as Gery hopes, and if my commissions from SFI grow faster than they have in the past, I’ll remain an affiliate and continue promoting the company and its products.

On my birthday, July 1, 2009, I’m going to decide one way or the other. I’ll continue to do my part, but SFI is going to have to improve substantially for me to continue promoting it.

I only have a limited amount of time, effort, and money and I intend to refocus on the very best affiliate programs. I hope SFI makes the cut.

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback about SFI Marketing Group.

Act on your dream!

JD

(Update August 2009: Affiliate links removed, as I no longer promote SFI Marketing Group.)

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Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, It’s Back To Work We Go

August 25, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 3 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Sitesell and Site Build It, Webhosting 

Summer is coming to a close.

No more vacations. No more lazy days in the sun.

It’s time to go back to school and back to work.

This raises the question, “Do you like your work?”

Over the years, I’ve had a few jobs. I liked some of them and had a hard time dragging myself out of bed to go to others.

It’s incredible how much of a difference it makes if you like your work.

These days, I love to wake up and get started. First, I make a detour to put on some coffee, and then I go turn on my computers and printer. I log into the account I’ll be using (I have several accounts set up on my Mac and each is customized for specific tasks) and go get a cup of coffee while my computer loads the applications and documents most commonly used for the things I’ll be doing.

Total elapsed time, under five minutes, tops. No commute, no traffic, no outrageous gasoline prices. If I didn’t make coffee, I could be at work in about one minute.

You’ll notice that I didn’t say anything about getting up in the morning. That’s not the way I work. As I write this, it’s a few minutes after midnight and I’m going strong. I had a nap this afternoon and I’ll be working for a few more hours, probably.

Work has been a bit slow this evening, because I was keeping one eye on the closing ceremonies of the Olympics while I worked. I was reminded of how much I enjoyed watching Michael Phelps win his eight gold medals. I was also happy to see Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh win their gold medal in beach volleyball, making it a history-setting back-to-back win in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics.

But, now the Olympics are over and I can return my full attention to what I’m doing.

It’s the time of year to get back to work. I love what I do. Do you?

I could make more money if I went back to consulting or being a systems administrator, but I just don’t need the stress and long hours, any more.

I enjoy researching products and services and recommending the best I can find to you and other readers of my blogs and websites.

I love working at home, on my own schedule. If I’m tired, I rest or sleep. If I don’t feel like working, I watch a movie or read a book.

When I feel like working, which is most of the time, I work on improving and expanding my websites, forums, blogs, lenses, and communities. I meet interesting people all around the world and receive very welcome commission checks from the few companies I recommend.

It’s not at all like it was back when I was paving roads and pouring concrete in the heat of the summer and cold of the winter. I never slice into the palm of my hand as I did back when I used to open about 200 dozen oysters at a seafood restaurant every evening. I don’t suffer from millions of stinging glass fibers as I did when I packed fiberglass insulation. Those were not my favorite jobs – not at all.

So, what makes it possible for me to work at home and make money using my computer and an Internet connection?

I’ve invested a lot of time and effort to learn affiliate marketing, and I’m doing better every year. This is a fairly easy business, but doing it as well as I can takes some effort and discipline.

If I’m not careful, I spend all my time building new websites, starting new blogs, and doing all the other things I can do half-asleep. Up to a point, this is a useful exercise, because I’ve been able to test lots of things to see how they work, or don’t work, for me.

I’ve joined hundreds of affiliate programs to learn how they work from the inside and have found that most return either very little or no return on my investment of time, effort and money. However, I’m determined to be successful at this and every time I learn something I don’t like about an affiliate program, I recognize what I do like about the programs that work for me.

As I’ve mentioned before, my favorite is the SiteSell Five Pillar affiliate program. Not only do they offer an outstanding product, Site Build It!, they also have the best affiliate program I’ve been able to find.

It has all I’m looking for:

  • An excellent product
  • Great support and training
  • An active and supportive forum
  • Lifetime commissions
  • Recurring annual commissions
  • High commissions per sale

So, I enjoy promoting Site Build It.

You know what I say, right, “If it’s not good enough for me, it isn’t good enough for you.”

I’m a very happy SiteSell customer and I use Site Build It! to power my Act On Your Dream! website.

I have big plans for that site and I’ve been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work on a complete redesign and expansion of that site that I plan to complete before the end of the year. It won’t look much different, but I believe you’ll find it more useful.

Gee, John, get to the point, already!

Sorry about that. I do tend to get long-winded (or should that be long-fingered), don’t I?

OK. Here it is.

My life has changed for the better because of Ken Evoy, SiteSell, and Site Build It! I’m living my dream of working at home in the mountains far from the nearest city and doing what I want when I want to do it. That’s what I call freedom.

It all started when I found, and bought, Make Your Site Sell! a few years ago. I learned from that ebook what I needed to do to redesign and rebuild my websites so that I could make money via affiliate marketing. I was happy to pay for that book and I earned back my tiny investment hundreds of times since putting into action what I learned there. Now that ebook is a free download.

I liked Make Your Site Sell! so much that I became a Sitesell 5 Pillar Club member and started earning money by recommending it to other people who were looking for legitimate ways to earn money online.

Later, when Site Build It! was introduced, I bought a subscription and put it to work. One of these days, when I have more time, I’m going to buy another subscription and create another niche site.

If you’ve been considering purchasing Site Build It so you can learn how to build a successful online business, this is a good time of year to get started.

Did you know that over half of SBI! owners own more than one SBI site? Some own several.

But, SBI isn’t magic. It provides the tools and training, but you have to bring your brains, inspiration, knowledge, ambition, creativity, and motivation to the party. It takes a lot of work to build a successful business, even if you have the best tools available.

When you take it one step at a time, however, and follow the action guide that is part of the SBI process, you’ll find it manageable and achievable, even if you’ve never built a website before.

I’ve watched thousands of people on the members-only SiteSell forums go from that wide-eyed deer-in-the-headlights stage to offering sage advice to others a year later.

If you’re willing to invest a year or two in learning the tools, following the guide, and building your site, you may become one of the success stories featured in the case studies or have your site featured on the results page.

Of course, not everyone succeeds, and SBI doesn’t do your work for you, so if you’re not willing to spend a year or two to build something that can provide profits for years to come, then this isn’t for you. It’s work, no doubt about it.

But, if you have a passion for something and love researching it and telling others, then you already have the personality and some of the traits that make building an online business easier and more enjoyable.

Between now and August 29, 2008, at midnight, you have a choice. You can buy a one-year subscription to SBI for $299, or you can get two subscriptions for only $100 more.

Sure, you can keep both sites and build them yourself, but you may find that it’s better to give that second site to a friend, spouse, parent, child, or colleague. By giving that site to someone else, he or she will become your lifetime customer. If they join the affiliate program, they’ll be on your second-tier, a part of your team.

You can change your business life, and that of someone close to you, for the better.

Just remember to do it before the special ends on August 29 at midnight.

SiteSell and Site Build It! have helped me change my life and it’s working for thousands of other customers, too.

Why not you?

Act on your dream!

JD

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The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination

August 16, 2008 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Act On Your Dream!, Friends and Family, Success and Failure 

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, recently delivered her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

I was told about this speech by one of my friends on the members-only SiteSell forums for Site Build It! subscribers. Thanks, Colin.

If I hadn’t heard about her speech there, I might have missed it and that would have been a real shame.

In reading her speech, I was surprised by how little she referred to Harry Potter, even though writing her novels took her to dizzying heights of success.

Instead, she talks about the liberation of total failure and the importance of imagining new futures and different pasts.

In talking about failure, part of what she emphasized was:

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

I have experienced this level of failure a couple of times in my life. It isn’t fun, but it can be educational and liberating. Depending upon how you react to it, these experiences can put steel in your resolve and be a foundation upon which you can build your future success.

It reminds me of the lines Kris Kristofferson wrote in “Bobby McGee” when he said, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Once you’ve lost everything – materially, that is – you aren’t encumbered by the things you want to believe about yourself, because many of them fall away as you lose houses, cars, credit ratings, and other things we associate with material affluence.

Other parts of the experience can be harder, or they can be liberating. For example, to one person, losing a spouse can be something that will hurt for decades. To another, it can be a difficult, but liberating, experience that will make it easier to build a better life, move in a different direction, and grow more as a person.

This level of failure is truly difficult and poverty is not something I would wish on anyone.

However, it can be life-changing, if you take the steps to do what you truly want to do. Like a phoenix rising from its own ashes, you can rise to new levels of success, understanding, and personal fulfillment that you would never have achieved, otherwise.

Is it easy?

No.

Can you do it?

Yes.

As she progressed with her speech, Ms. Rowling says this about imagination:

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

Here is where the speech took a turn that really surprised me.

I was sure she was going to emphasize the imagination that enabled her to write all the Harry Potter stories, but she went in a very different direction.

Instead, she talked about her earliest exeriences when working with Amnesty International and all the suffering that had been experienced by people who had been tortured and killed and the uncertainty, pain, and worry experienced by their family and friends.

I have to tell you, this is totally outside my own experiences, but after reading what she wrote, I have found more empathy for the people who have experienced these horrors.

Compared to them, even in my deepest failures and during the darkest days of my life, I have had it easy and safe.

Ms. Rowling continued and said:

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

Imagination is a powerful thing.

It is the basis for all future inventions.

By imagining, we can achieve things undreamed of by others.

Napoleon Hill said, in Think and Grow Rich:

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

This is the power that we have to create new worlds and change the horrors we have inherited from those who preceded us.

We can write novels that inspire millions to read more.

We can develop better products and services to solve problems and offer opportunities to people around the world.

Or, when used negatively, we can imagine worse things that we can do to make the lives of our fellow earthlings even more miserable.

The choice is up to us.

The choice is up to you.

Or, if you prefer, you can choose not to use your power of imagination. You can continue to lead the life you’re living and not imagine the great future you can live if you pursue your dreams and follow your passions.

Again, the choice is yours.

Ms. Rowling closes her speech by talking about her friends. These are the people that offer support and help in times of need and share joy in times of abundance.

Even when I lost everything, I still had my friends and family.

True friends can be even more important than your family, because you may have closer bonds and more in common with them.

You don’t need a lot of friends, but I hope you have a few really close friends with whom you share your life. These friends are treasures worth far more than the rarest metals or the prettiest sparkly rocks.

Share your life with your friends and family. Help each other live to your fullest potential.

Thank you, Ms. Rowling, for an outstanding speech and I’m happy I was able to read it. (If you have broadband, you can watch the video.)

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

Now, it’s up to you.

You have the power to change the world.

Act on your dream!

JD

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What other webhosting company can show results like SiteSell can?

May 3, 2008 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Sitesell and Site Build It, Webhosting, Websites 

I was reading the members-only SiteSell forums and read Ken Evoy’s announcement of a revised results page showing hundreds of websites created with Site Build It!

Not only can SiteSell show hundreds of successful websites, they’re actually finding it more difficult to revise the page.

Why? Because there aren’t enough successful sites?

Hardly!

It’s because there are so many successful sites that they are finding it difficult to pick only the best for the results page.

A few years ago, when there were only about 60,000,000 active websites, an SBI webmaster could make the results page even if their site was only in the top 3% of all sites on the Internet.

Now, with the number of active websites somewhere between 100,000,000 and 160,000,000, you have to rank in the top 1% of all those sites to be listed on the Site Build It! results page.

What other webhosting company do you know of that shows hundreds of websites that rank in the Top 1% of all sites on the entire Internet? The really important thing is that the vast majority of those sites were created by normal, non-technical people who wanted to build a successful online business, and, in many cases, the sites they built are outperforming websites created by experts.

These are normal people, some of them probably a lot like you, who have followed the Site Build It! Action Guide and have built high-traffic websites in only a year or two that have risen to the top of the heap. Most of them knew little or nothing about building an online business before they subscribed to Site Build It.

If they can do it, why can’t you?

Seriously.

Act on your dream!

JD

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