Affiliate Summit West 2010 Review

Affiliate Summit West 2010 was packed with people. Over 4,000 affiliate marketers, merchants, vendors and Internet entrepreneurs networked, absorbed information, played hard and partied till the wee hours of the morning. Jeremy Shoemaker, an Internet entrepreneur wizard, said that this event was the best one he has ever attended. Of course if you see his videos of black jack fun, target shooting practice, and Las Vegas magic, you will see why.

There were many super affiliates in attendance and monthly income stats could not have been better. There were people there reporting incomes varying between $200 a month up to $100,000 a month and probably more. Just an incredible range of statistics. It was hard to believe that the economy could produce this kind of success. Being a New Media Entrepreneur is paying off in a big way.

Affiliate Marketing Tips for 2010

• Make people feel that your web site is “their” web site.
• Make sure your traffic is not reliant on one source.
• Create your own product for the biggest bang for your efforts.
• Answer questions for people.
• Teach people things that they might not know.
• Use videos to get traffic – Youtube.com is the second largest search engine on the web.
• Get your best commission rates by working directly with companies.
• Get people to pay attention to you over time.
• Ask people to share your content.
• Determine the angle that causes people to talk about you.
• Success is sticking with a problem longer than anyone else.
• Rich overnight days ended in 1994.
• You are not going to know what works, your audience will tell you that.
• Build a media asset that will last over time.
• 86% of ezinearticles.com members write less than 10 articles.
• Write more articles and you will get more traffic.
• Treat people the way you want to be treated.

Discover the Power of Influence

Dr. Cialdini, regarded as the most cited social psychologist in the world, powerfully delivered an insightful talk about marketing. His book, Influence, about persuasion and marketing has sold more than 2 million copies. It has been consistently listed in Amazon.com as a best seller and is recommended by Warren Buffet, one of the most successful investors in history.

Dr. Cialdini is an expert in understanding the reasons that people comply with requests in business. His Six Principles of Persuasion Reciprocation, Scarcity, Authority, Consistency, Liking, and Consensus describe how you can produce lasting change in others.

He suggested that as new media entrepreneurs when we encounter people, we need to ask ourselves how we can be of service to them. People are most likely to give back when they are given something of value. What have you given to your audience lately?

Brian Clarke, owner of copyblogger.com teaches people “The Art and Science of Compelling Copy.” The blog, which he started in February of 2006, has 97,398 subscribers and hundreds of thousands of regular readers.

CopyBlogger has earned a Google page rank of 5, which means that the Blog is seen by others as having good authority. Brian has managed to inspire many people to share their expertise with the world by writing good copy for their readers and teaching them exactly how to do it.

Brian taught us that leading your business presentation with admission of fault first, followed by the benefits of your product or service is very powerful in moving people towards acceptance of your product or ideas. Apparently Aristotle developed this art of persuasion more than 2,000 years ago. Aren’t we glad we are catching on now?

Networking With Marketing Gurus

Ask any one of these people what kind of future they look forward to and I think you’ll receive a unanimous vote for prosperous! Affiliate Summit West 2010 was definitely a huge success and one that will not soon be forgotten.

People in this photo from left to right:

Heather Smith, Brian Littleton, Murray Newlands, Bill Swartwout, Jason Rubacky, Heather Blackburn, Adam Riemer, Andrew Crim, Chuck Hamrick, Julie Vazquez, and Jill Pepitone.

Launching a new website – Days 21-30

Launching a new website is not as easy as some would have you think. This is the last article in a series of articles that covered the promotional strategies of the first 30 days in the launching of a new website. Time will help any new website get more traffic and this site is so new that it will have to go through some growing pains for the next four months. Patience is needed to develop and get these new sites to a profitable stage.

The last week of the month showed some solid traffic increases. The total visitors for the month was 1018. As a whole, that wasn’t too bad. Next year at this time, it will be interesting to compare the differences.

Using SEO elite, I checked for the number of backlinks and there were 22 backlinks. These backlinks were acquired by writing articles and making comments on other people’s websites.

I checked the main search engines to see how many pages were indexed with each engine. Google has indexed 104 pages. Yahoo has 38 pages. MSN has only one page indexed and I’m not sure how to get more pages indexed by them. I just found a link to submit sites to MSN: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx so now I’ve submitted to that website. Alta Vista reported indexing 38 pages and All The Web has indexed 38 pages.

One strategy that I have added to this site is to add a blog. I think that WordPress blogs are very search engine friendly and I believe that adding content to it on a regular basis will be helpful.

I was able to get some help in making my website comply with the W3C, the web standards organization for all web pages. I have tried in the past to get compliant with that website, but my web skills were not good enough to understand how to change things to get into compliance. A friend of mine from the Philippines told me about a fellow named Taylor S. Ripley. He runs a web development and hosting site at http://www.turkreno.com/. I gave him a call and he was nice enough to walk me through correcting all the mistakes that were on my front page. He also helped me create a more useful sitemap and I have submitted that to the search engines.  He was so knowledgeable and helpful. I highly recommend him as a person to help you with your SEO efforts. It was so nice to meet someone that was so helpful.

So to wrap things up for this 30 Day Plan, I’d like to review the most valuable lessons that I learned during this time period.

1.  When developing a new site, submit a basic sitemap for at least part of your site to Google webmaster tools so you can start getting some traffic.

2.  When your site is completed, submit another sitemap to Google so that they will index all of your pages.

3.  Submit your new site to Yahoo, MSN, All The Web and Alta Vista.

4.  Begin the process of creating a sense of community by visiting other sites that relate to your topic and participate in their conversations on their blogs.

5. Write articles that relate to your product or website and make sure that they get distributed to a large number of directories.

6. Make sure your site is W3 Compliant.

7. Be patient and keep contributing to your site by making it better and offering people more resources and help.

8. Start trying something, anything. Some of what you do will work, and some things won’t. Doing something is better than just dreaming about it.

9. Realize that it takes time for your new project to become profitable and know that it is possible to get your sites profitable enough to support yourself.

10. Network with other people through http://www.meetup.com to find others in your community that are pursuing the same types of business.

I hope that part of this experience has helped you learn what you can do to get your sites started an on to profitability. Good luck with your projects!

How to Promote Your Website

Internet Entrepreneurs Strategic Success Plan

Preparing for success is a process that may take longer than you think. It seems that with any worthwhile endeavor, there are things to accomplish that take you much longer than you had planned for. Some people would have you believe that being an Internet entrepreneur is a simple thing to do and that being successful at it is a cinch.

Let’s use Jay Leno as an example.  Although he is not an Internet entrepreneur, he is a successful business man. After watching his nightly current events monologue you probably felt better about life because you had a few good, perhaps great laughs. That ten-minute television dialogue is something people used to love to hear and would stay up late at night to tune in to.

It was recently revealed in a Wall Street Journal article about Jay Leno’s upcoming television show that the short segment of comedy actually takes quite a bit more preparation time than you or I might think. Apparently there are six hours of preparation time and discussion with twenty experienced writers to produce this short comedic dialogue. Even with all that effort put into the short segment, Jay Leno often runs his monologue by his high school and home town friends to see what they think.

So what does that teach Internet entrepreneurs about becoming successful?

A lot can be learned from this revelation about the preparation time it takes to be successful. Preparing for success can take more than the 30 minutes you might have planned. In fact even after you have had years of Internet training, successful projects may take a tremendous amount of time to arrive in the winner’s circle.

When you think you are prepared, ask yourself what kind of effort you put into your current entrepreneurial project. Did you converse with anyone else about the feasibility of your Internet entrepreneurial project?  What kind of expert advice did you receive and did you take that advice?  Will people benefit from what you have prepared and how will they benefit?

To be successful as an Internet entrepreneur, you are going to need a good plan and a realistic prediction of the time it will take to accomplish your plan, You are going to need to discuss it with other successful Internet entrepreneurs and perhaps your old friends from long ago. You will need to plan for your project to benefit others and the degree to which that will occur will be the degree to which you are successful.

The Social Media Golden Triangle

If you have been baffled and confused and just don’t know where to start with social media, you must not have heard of the Golden Triangle. The Golden Triangle was lost thousands of years ago… Wait! That’s a different story, this one was discovered within the past two years!

This is a story of how the Social Media Golden Triangle can completely transform the way you communicate with your clients and customers and your business. We all know that economic times have changed. You have been hearing about Social Media, Social Networking, Viral Video and many other social media outlets that you wish you could leverage and turn into business.

What I’m about to discuss is nothing new, but it is a strong force that if used properly, will change the course of your business.

You have undoubtedly heard a lot of hype and hoopla around Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. These three sites make up “The Social Media Golden Triangle”. Now is the time to put them to work for your business. Using the Golden Triangle can help you identify, attract, and interact with your target audience. This powerful combination of websites can take you from just barely surviving to thriving in the current economy.

Let’s look at each piece of the Golden Triangle separately so we have a basic understanding as to what each piece does:

Twitter

Twitter is a new tool designed to keep things short and sweet. There’s no time for industry jargon, just tell me how it is and I’ll decide if it’s worth my time to view your full message. Part branding strategy, part relationship development, Twitter is one of the most popular and fastest growing websites on the Internet today. Twitter is a pitch free zone, don’t bother pitching your products or service, think and write frequently and consistently. Be sure to offer value, how can you help your followers.

Facebook

Social media marketing, actually, marketing in general shouldn’t be about you!

Yes I said it, in fact your company isn’t about you, it’s everything to do with your customer or client. Your website isn’t about you it should be about your clients or customers problems and how you can solve them.

A strategy to leverage Facebook is to create groups around the problem you solve, not the product or service you offer. People aren’t looking for the solution by name, they are searching for the solution to their problem, so start by talking about their problems .

YouTube

Know it, Like it and Trust it…If “you can’t believe everything that you hear,” “seeing is believing” and a picture is worth a thousand words, then video must be the “it”.

Done right, you can connect with, and get your audience to know, like and trust you.

Again, we are in a NO Pitching Zone, where people are more concerned with content and value than hearing what you have to offer. In videos, be yourself, talk about the problem your target audience may be having and ways you can help solve them. Educational videos position you as the expert and help you attract the right people, they also help people solve their problems, making you look like problem solver.

Bringing it All Together

Think about it, what we are addressing here is the need for communication with the people you want to get in front of, how to leverage you website better how to  leverage all of these people flocking to these social media sites. How to get your message in front of them without pissing them off and just posting advertisements Social media isn’t just a new way to communicate, it’s a completely different culture and needs to be approached carefully when used as a marketing tool for your business.

Before jumping in and starting a campaign, learn each piece of the triangle’s culture first, social media users want value, not fluff and advertisements.

By Dan Beldowicz
Article Source
Dan Beldowicz is the Senior Marketing Consultant at Single Throw Internet Marketing. Online for over 11 years, Dan is helping companies develop websites that generate business and social media campaigns that connect with customers. Follow Dan on Twitter at http://twitter.com/danbeldowicz or on the Single Throw Blog.

Launching a new website – days 14-21

This article is a continuation of a 30 day plan to launch a new website offering personal checks. The goal of the plan was to do something every day to promote the site and see what kind of traffic we’d get. Unfortunately on August 8, the site went into the Google sandbox and none of the pages that were being listed with top positions in Google were being listed anymore. The site is still in the sandbox unfortunately. It’s not hard to tell when your site is in the sandbox because your pages won’t pull up for the search terms they were originally pulling up for.

As you can see from the graph  the site is going through ups and downs in traffic. Most visible is the drastic decrease in traffic on August 8. There is a steady increase, but this is not due to getting out of the sandbox, it is due to some promotion efforts through a company I hired to help.

Originally, I planned not to spend any money during this first thirty day period, but I caved in after the drop in traffic. I hired a company that helped me with this website and asked them to do the same thing for my new site. If you are interested in knowing who they are and what they do, be sure to email me.

The goal is to get between 500 and 700 visitors per day. At that point, the site will be pulling in some decent income.

Sites can be in the sandbox for three to six months so the plan now is to build high authority back links which means getting the site listed in different directories.

The plan now is to:
1. Add quality content to the site through a blog.

2. Work on increasing the number of inbound links (quality links not just any old link).

3. Tweak and improve the SEO quality of your site.

4. Write articles.
So you should be seeing some changes coming soon to the site which will include a WordPress Blog.

Again, the biggest mistake made with this site was to wait until the entire site was done before submitting the site to Google. So if you are working on a new site, be sure and get at least a few pages presentable with a sitemap and submit it. Hopefully that will shorten your stay in the sandbox.

Sex is Used in Almost Every Business

I sat there at the table as the training manager explained how the new plastic bottle was designed to look sexy. I questioned why it was important for a detergent bottle to look sexy? The manager explained that a scientific study was done on hundreds of women and most of those women reached for the sexier bottle.

Detergent bottle A. is the sexy bottle.

Detergent bottle B. is the plain boring bottle.

In the scientific study it was even proven that women would choose bottle A, even if it was a bit more expensive. Bottle B. however must be much cheaper or filled with a much better product to compete with bottle A.

It all sounded pretty insane to me but then again, most people know more about Paris Hilton than they do Mother Teresa. I sat there and thought “Are we zoned out zombies of corporate sexual bombardment?”. I had to admit, bottle A. did have a nice sexy curve and bottle B. kinda looked like my old English teacher. He had a massive beer belly.

By the time the meeting was over, my mind was spinning out ways that business sells to us through sex. The media is infested with sexy selling. Automobile companies design body styles with the female body in mind. Count the S curves on and inside your car, you will be amazed! Furniture and even kitchen ware is designed with sex in mind.

Selling with sex is far from a new idea. Look at musical instruments such as violins and guitars. Look at ancient designs and find the S curves. I believe that selling with sex evolved and boomed with the industrial revolution. Wow, even my mouse was designed with sex in mind! For more information click here.

Article Source
By Tom Cornett

Launching a new web site – days 11, 12, 13

Well, unfortunately I believe that my new site is officially in the “sandbox” which is Google’s way of controlling sites.

At Webconf.com the Google sandbox is explained in detail.

It’s never easy for newcomers to enter a market and there are barriers of different kinds. For newcomers to the world of search engines, the barrier is called a sandbox – your site stays there until it gets mature enough to be allowed to the Top Positions club. Although there is no direct confirmation of the existence of a sandbox, Google employees have implied it and SEO experts have seen in practice that new sites, no matter how well optimized, don’t rank high on Google, while on MSN and Yahoo they catch quickly. For Google, the jailing in the sandbox for new sites with new domains is on average 6 months, although it can vary from less than a month to over 8 months.

There are hurdles to overcome, just because the site is new. It might have been helpful to have submitted a few pages to Google when I first got the site going so that it would have time to get out of the sandbox.

Cpanel Stats are:

01 Aug 2009 29
02 Aug 2009 26
03 Aug 2009 36
04 Aug 2009 43
05 Aug 2009 67
06 Aug 2009 35
07 Aug 2009 50
08 Aug 2009 11
09 Aug 2009 11
10 Aug 2009 24
11 Aug 2009 9
12 Aug 2009 12

You’ll notice the drastic drop in visitors due to the sandbox effect. It’s very frustrating to go through these growing pains. My goal is to get back into the “top position’s club.”

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