Differences Between Rich and Poor Affiliate Marketers

By Jay Stockwell

If you want your affiliate business to really fly, don't treat it like a hobby.

I believe this is one of the primary differences between rich and poor affiliate marketers.

Lots of the poor affiliate marketers blame their lack of knowledge, most times technical knowledge, for the failure of their business.

They tinker with this and that, but never really get serious with one thing to make it their "business". They just fluff around. :)

The poor affiliate marketer has no strategy, no systems, no goals and no tracking. In fact, there is very little about what they are doing that even suggests they are running a business.

I get to meet and chat with lots of different affiliate marketers. From folks who are yet to make a dollar, right through to Uber affiliates who are making 50k+ profit a day.

One of the striking differences in these two sets of people is the way that they treat their business.

There are some guys I know that are doing 7 figures a year and can barely write a line of HTML.

That doesn't matter to them. They know that Donald Trump is a lousy tradesman. They know that they don't need to be good at everything. They understand that they are just the captain of the team.

They orchestrate their business by leveraging their time to the maximum by using planned methods and systems to grow their businesses.

All the while tracking and measuring what is going on to continue on a constant trail of improvement.

Overtime, they move away from working "IN" the business towards spending most of their time working "ON" the business.

They simply become the conductor of this massive online profit generating orchestra.

Staff, software and systems are the musicians.

In practice, it's difficult to execute this perfectly.

In recent times I've found myself spending way to much time in spreadsheets, accounting packages and in companies affiliate areas instead of working on growing the business.

A lot of this stuff I can't outsource and we're not big enough to have an accounting manager in-house.

So unfortunately, my ability to leverage my time was diminishing because I was so caught up in the administration. To be honest, it has been starting to get me down.

Thankfully, I recently came across StatsJunky.

It's not often that I would call a piece of software a savior. But in this case, I would say that it really has been.

Recently I was introduced by a friend to the StatsJunky crew. For the past 9 months they've been working on a piece of software that quite frankly I didn't think was possible to create.

I thought that given the level of difficulty working with so many different affiliate programs it would largely be impossible.

However, somehow they've done it.

Actually I know how. Through shear determination. They've got close to 20 people working to make this dream a reality.

What this magical piece of software does is essentially manages the time consuming and many times painful parts of your affiliate marketing business.

It downloads your stats from all your affiliate programs, as well as your PPC accounts if you use paid search.

In one neat dashboard you can see what you would normally have to login to all your different accounts to see.

You can even add in your recurring monthly costs like web hosting so you can get a full perspective on your monthly profits.

Every few days I'm now able to open up StatsJunky and see what has happened across our entire affiliate marketing business.

How much we've earned from each of our different revenue streams.
Plus, how much we've spent generating a lot of that income.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. You can drill down for each network and instantly see which programs are generating the bulk of the income.

Very quickly you can establish where your time is going to yield the biggest return on investment.

As an example, within minutes of using StatsJunky, I was able to identify that one of our largely neglected affiliate sites was actually making us $5.04 for every click on one of our affiliate links.

It was converting at an amazing 14.63%.

Guess where we'll immediately be sending more traffic and instantly making more money? :)

Without StatsJunky, I probably would never have identified this. I'm just too busy to manually log into every account to check these kind of stats.

One other really cool thing about StatsJunky is how amazingly dedicated they are to their new users. What other company do you know that have daily Q&A webinars with their customers?

As another example, I asked them if they could add another small affiliate program that we use to the software. They immediately went to work to add it overnight.

They now support 200+ affiliate programs.

This software really is the revelation for me in 2009. I trust that it's going to be a key component of growing our business even in these rough economic times.

After all, regardless of the size of your business, one of the key aspects to seeing strong growth is the tracking of what is working and what is not.

It's not rocket science. You focus more on the stuff that is working, and drop the stuff that isn't.

If you are an affiliate marketer, I would encourage you to take your business seriously. So don't treat it like a hobby.

Put together a clear strategy with goals in place to see how you're doing. Track your goals and reward yourself when you hit them.

As part of the process put systems in place like StatsJunky so you can easily track your progress and focus squarely on the things that are making you money.

Then with the time you save, you can engage in income generating activities like increasing your traffic or improving your conversion rates.

If you want to see StatsJunky in action, check out the video I got the StatsJunky crew to make for you guys. It gives an 8 minute demo on how it works.

Check it out here:

http://www.associateprograms.com/articles/806/1/

Note: They have a FREE 7 day trial and a credit card is NOT required to get started. See for yourself just how good this thing is.

I reckon EVERY affiliate marketer should at least try StatsJunky to see just how good it is for themselves.

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Thought for today: Don't waste time
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"It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste time." - Henry Ford


All the best

Jay Stockwell

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Do you keep a journal?

Statistically it is over the top! Countless times over the years when meeting "Jim Rohn's greatest fan," we've been impressed with how many were the real deal. You know, the ones who followed Jim's pearls of wisdom and went on to achieve great things and, yes, had made a decision to be a collector and student of great ideas (including their own) by keeping a journal.

A journal that would chronicle their own personal story: their family, their victories, their challenges, their GOALS and DREAMS, their seminar and sermon notes, their own ideas and thoughts. All these things that they could review now and in the future and create one of the more priceless collections for themselves and their families as the years roll on.




Jim tells the story of someone breaking into his RV while on a trip, and his only major concern was if they had taken his journals. Not the furniture or the TV, but the thing that truly was not replaceable, a piece of his life—his journals.

2009 is almost here. What a perfect time to begin, renew or continue this simple, yet invaluable habit, so that at the end of 2009 you simply add your own book of your life's collection of events, stories, ideas and goals to your library and then go to work with a fresh new journal for 2010.

Here's a little from Jim Rohn on keeping a journal the past 40+ years:

"Be a collector of good ideas, but don't trust your memory. The best collecting place for all of the ideas and information that comes your way is your journal."

"The reason why I spend so much money for my journals is to press me to find something valuable to put in them."

"There are three things to leave behind: your photographs, your library and your personal journals. These things are certainly going to be more valuable to future generations than your furniture!"

"Don't use your mind for a filing cabinet. Use your mind to work out problems and find answers; file away good ideas in your journal."

To Fifht Comment Spam - No Follow tags for Wordpress Blog

Blogs are great! People love them! Google loves them! Spammers love them!

Yup... it's unfortunate, but spammers love blogs so much that they have found numerous ways to ruin it for us good mannered folks, who used to be able to get high quality backlinks by commenting on posts in blogs.

Now known as comment spam - it's a way that bloggers spread around their garbage and they do it by mass attacking our blogs with phony comments filled with text links.

It has driven many blog owners to turn off comments or at the least moderate them.

Plugins like Akismet for Wordpress help keep a lot of the spam out, but some of them still get through.

Not too long ago Google took a vocal position on comment spam and pretty much threw it's weight around and demanded that Wordpress and other blogging platforms adopt a new policy to get rid of comment spam and help enforce the web with Google's "nofollow" tag.

The tag basically tells Google NOT to follow the links or at the very least not to recognize them as high quality links. Who knows what else the search engines do when they see these nofollow links. That's a whole other discussion.

But now Mike Liebner have found a solution and it is so simple. It's a cool free Wordpress plugin called DoFollow 4.0 and you can get it here:

http://www.mikeliebner.com/linking/free-dofollow-plugin-wordpress/

It's so simple all you do is copy the plug-in, a .php file, and drop it in your WP blogs plugin folder - upload it - turn it on and BOOM - now all the links properly pass their juice.

In fact there are actually programs and lists out there that compile addresses of "do follow" blogs - only problem is - many of the lists are out of date - because all it takes is an upgrade to WP and many of them go back to "nofollow".

The Power of Personal Charisma

By: Brian Tracy

Become An Irresistible Person
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines charisma as "a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure."

Develop Personal Magnetism
Charisma is also that special quality of magnetism that each person has and that each person uses to a certain degree. You have a special charisma to the people who look up to you, who respect and admire you, the members of your family and your friends and coworkers. Whenever and wherever a person feels a positive emotion toward another, he imbues that person with charisma, or attractiveness.

Project Yourself Positively
In trying to explain charisma, some people speak of an "aura." This aura is a light that is invisible to most people, but not to everyone, and that radiates out from a person and affects the people around that person in a positive or negative way. The halo around the heads of saints and mystics in many religious paintings was the artist's attempt to depict the light that people reported seeing around the heads of these men and women when they were speaking or praying, or in an intense emotional state.

Control the Impression You Make
You also have an aura around you that most people cannot see but that is there, nevertheless. This aura affects the way people react and respond to you, either positively or negatively. There is a lot that you can do, and a lot of good reasons for you to do it, to control this aura and make it work in your best interests.

Sell Your Way to the Top
If you're in sales, this aura, reflecting your level of charisma, can have a major impact on the way your prospects and customers treat you and deal with you. Top salespeople seem to be far more successful than the average salespeople in getting along with their customers. They're always more welcome, more positively received and more trusted than the others. They sell more, and they sell more easily. They make a better living, and they build better lives. Salespeople with charisma get far more pleasure out of their work and suffer far less from stress and rejection. The charismatic salesperson is almost invariably a top performer in his field and enjoys all the rewards that go with superior sales.

Influence People Around You
If you're in business, developing greater charisma can help you tremendously in working with your staff, your suppliers, your bankers, your customers and everyone else upon whom you depend for your success. People seem naturally drawn to those who possess charisma.

They want to help them and support them. When you have charisma, people will open doors for you and bring you opportunities that otherwise would not have been available to you.

Enhance Your Personal Relationships
In your personal relationships, the quality of charisma can make your life more joyous, happier. People will naturally want to be around you. Members of your family and your friends will be far happier in your company, and you will have a greater influence on them, causing them to feel better about themselves and to do better at the important things in their lives.

Action Exercises
First, identify the people with whom you seem to have a lot of charisma - the people who know you, like you, respect you the most. How could you increase your charisma with these people?

Second, identify the people who have charisma to you, the people you most like and respect and admire. What is there about them that you could copy or emulate? If you think charisma, you'll have more of it.

The Psychology of Selling

Article: Power-Up Your Sales Letter with a "Johnson Box" - By Ivan Levison

Sixty years ago, a direct mail copywriter named Frank H. Johnson was looking for a way to increase the impact of his sales letters. He decided that instead of forcing readers to wade through a mass of copy before making the offer, he would highlight the offer in a centered rectangular box placed at the very top of the letter above the salutation.

The results were terrific, and the "Johnson Box" has been going strong ever since. And no surprise. The box stands out at the top of the letter, and the eye goes right to the headline floating within it. There are claims that adding a Johnson Box to a plain letter can shoot response rates up by 40%!

Here are some tips you can use for putting a Johnson Box to work the RIGHT way:

1. Put the right content in the box.
What should you include there? The offer. The main product benefit. The phone number to call or the URL to visit. The expiration date of the offer. The guarantee. Mix and match these as appropriate.

2. Use it in the right kind of letter.
If you're writing a non-personalized letter that's going out bulk rate in a window envelope using teaser copy, a Johnson Box will fit right in. After all, it's part of the "classic package" format. (Don't scoff at it. It still works!) But if you're writing a first class letter, in a close-faced envelope riding first class, the Johnson Box will look cheap and out of place.

3. Make it the right size.
If you're mailing an 8 1/2" x 11" letter (folded twice down to 3 5/8") you want the Johnson Box and AT LEAST the salutation line to appear above the fold. 2" deep by 3 1/2" wide is reasonable, but there's no firm rule here.

4. Use an appropriate box shape.
You can make the box out of asterisks (************) or use a fine-ruled line. For added impact, throw a screened-back second color inside the box. It's also perfectly fine to omit the actual ruled line and simply run a bold headline and subheadline at the top of the letter.

5. Use a box in the body of the letter.
There's no law that says you can't throw your guarantee into a small box somewhere within the letter. Or a few testimonials. Or a short excerpt from a glowing product review.

6. Show your fulfillment piece in a box or at the top of your letter.
If you're offering a report, guide, White Paper, Executive Summary, whatever, use a photo of it at the top of the letter and use call-outs to highlight benefits. Making the fulfillment piece "real" with a photo can really help your lead generation efforts!

7. Include a Johnson Box (without the sides) in an e-mail for extra impact.

For example:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
This is a version of a Johnson Box without sides.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

See how the sentence stands out?

8. In an e-mail, the Johnson box should fit easily into the reader's auto-preview box.
You don't want to make people start scrolling in order to see it.

9. Use a box at the top of a seminar or Webinar invitation.
The top of the letter or e-mail is the perfect place for a box that tells the reader: What/When/Where/Why they should attend.

The take-away message? If you want to boost direct mail or e-mail response rates, sometimes it makes sense to think inside the box.


About the Author:

Ivan Levison is an award-winning, direct response freelance copywriter. Download a free copy of his new report, "101 Ways To Double Your Response Rates!" at http://www.levison.com/subscribe. Contact Ivan any time at ivan@levison.com