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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This takes work, money, and time.

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

I wrote about this here: Making progress by going backwards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about you?

How do you feel about affiliate marketing these days?

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

I’m looking forward to reading your comments.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , ,

Getting back to work

December 12, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 11 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, CafePress, Friends and Family, Success and Failure 

I’ve been missing in action the last couple of weeks.

After Mom’s funeral and burial, I thought I was doing okay. For about a week, I was surrounded by family and some of my closest friends and everything was going well.

Then, last week and this week, I have been alone in this house with so many memories of my Mom and Dad, and I just haven’t felt like doing anything. So, I took some time off. Mostly, I’ve been watching movies and TV shows I’ve rented from NetFlix and sleeping.

I’ve downloaded a couple of thousand emails and responded to the most important. The others will be skimmed or just deleted. If you sent me an important email and I haven’t responded in the next week, please resend it. I’ll try to keep up from here onward.

This week has been rather miserable. I woke up from a nap and thought I was getting a kidney infection or worse. The pain was sharp and intense. I couldn’t get comfortable sitting, standing, or lying down.

Fortunately, after a few days, I was sure it was a pinched nerve instead of a kidney infection or stone, so I started doing some easy stretches several times a day. Yesterday, I felt a pop when I moved just right and the pain is now much less and seems to be going away. That’s a very welcome relief.

If you’ve ever been in constant pain, you know how hard it is to concentrate on doing anything while you’re hurting.

I didn’t expect Mom’s death to take all the wind out of my sails, but it did. So much of my life has been focused on caring for her that I just didn’t know what to do. So, I gave myself permission to do nothing, for awhile.

This morning, I woke up for the first time feeling like I wanted to get back to work.

I tried making myself get back to work last week, but it wasn’t working. Today, however, I feel very different. I’m looking forward to getting my business back on track and writing about the things that have been working for me.

Fortunately, even though I haven’t felt like doing anything for the last three weeks, my websites have been working night and day for me. I’ve continued to make affiliate commissions for sales of Site Build It! and other products I’m proud to use and promote.

Even though I haven’t done much of anything with my Squidoo lenses for the last couple of months, I still received a payment from Squidoo this week and that doesn’t take into account the sign-ups to various offers and affiliate commissions I’ve made on those lenses.

Lots of you have been purchasing t-shirts, calendars, mugs, shopping bags, and other products from my Shirts-Mugs-Hats.com shop, powered by CafePress. While sales are lower than last year, it’s always nice to see lots of “You made a sale at CafePress” subject lines in my incoming email. Thanks to all of you who have purchased this year!

And, of course, there are quite a few other, smaller, income streams that add up to enough to make working at home profitable and worthwhile for me.

I have plans for more systematization of my marketing efforts in 2009 and I’m going to share what I’ve been learning with you in the coming months.

To be sure you don’t miss anything, you may want to subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed (see the large RSS icon at the top-right of every page) or subscribe to the postings via email by filling in the form at the top of the right column of every page, right below my photo.

I’ll do my best to make it worth your while.

Despite the world-wide economic problems, it is still worth promoting quality products – whether they are your own or via affiliate links – and earning from every sale.

Everything moves in cycles. The economic situation will improve in time, and those who put in the work now will be in a good place when confidence rises and people start spending more in the future.

It’s okay to take some time off, now and then, but it’s not okay to quit.

I’ve just been taking some time off, and now it’s time to go back to work.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , ,