01
Happy New Year Everyone.
2008 is now a memory and 2009 is a reality. I’ve accomplished a lot in this past year and hope you have to. It’s time to take a look inside yourself and set some aggressive but attainable goals for 2009.
I wish you all the very best.
26
I was speaking to Jeff, my affiliate manager at Copeac. He asked me if I had a plan for 2009. It’s such a simple question and sort of genious at the same time. I don’t think that most affiliates have a plan for the year. Like me, we wing it as we go, promoting whatever looks promising. Having a plan for the year could actually make you a lot of money. Rather then just promoting whatever comes up, try drawing out a gameplan of what you want to promote and at what time during the year. By thinking ahead you could bank on seasonal trends, holidays and increased traffic on the interwebs. By planning your valentines day campaign in December, you can give it a lot of thought, and possibly come up with something truly original when your not in a time crunch.
I personally am going to create a rough plan for 2009 of different products I want to promote. Will you be doing the same?
16
There are a lot of people that want to get into affiliate marketing. They read all of the forums and the blogs and envy those people speaking about how they make money online. Some of these people go as far as going to conferences or meetups to discusss affiliate marketing but have still not launched a campaign. My advice:
Launch a Friggen Campaign Already.
Just do SOMETHING! Stop reasearching cool tools. Stop talking to people on AIM trying to get them to give you the secret bullet. The secret bullet is work. Once you do the work, you will probably fail. You then learn from that failure and launch another campaign that does a little better. You will keep failing and tweaking and eventually succeed. I would imagine most people having success at affiliate marketing are the people putting in the work, rinsing and repeating.
Want my advice? Just do it!
05
Ian Fernando beat me to the punch on this post but I’m writing it anyway.
Ian, Wayne & I got together in NYC last night for one of our meetups. A topic came up that I had actually been meaning to write about for a while now and haven’t got around to write.
What Is A Hustler?
This question comes up often since my name is after all Ad Hustler. People ask me why I would want to be associated with such a negative term. I’ve been told that creating the business name Ad Hustler was the biggest mistake I ever made since people won’t trust me.
Off Topic Rant:
Throughout my life i’ve had a personality trait that some people find very odd.
I honestly don’t care what people think about me.
For real. A lot of people say that. I mean it. I can’t begin to explain how many people have just hated my guts throughout the years. It doesn’t bother me. In fact, I embrace the hate.
Back to the topic at hand: What is a Hustler?
A Hustler is someone who sees opportunity and ACTS ON IT! People go through life in a fog. Opportunities are right in front of their faces and they don’t see it. Even if they do see it, most don’t act on it. A Hustler is someone who sees this opportunity, can devise a plan, and benefit him or herself from that opportunity. Hustlers get a bad name and that’s probably because most are pretty dumb and use their hustlin’ for criminal activities. Not every hustler is bad. If you don’t trust me because my name is Ad Hustler, so be it, but your missing out on working with someone who knows their stuff.
Look deep inside yourself. Are you a hustler? Do you deserve hustler status? I hope so, because you aren’t going to make it in this industry if you can’t hustle.
Keep Hustlin’
01
Complacency - self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies
In any business, complacency can kill profit. People as a species tend to be easily satisfied. Look at how many people work for $50,000 a year and are thrilled to get a $2,500 raise. If they got a $10,000 raise they would probably wipe the bosses ass for the rest of the year as an added responsibility.
$2,500 A Year Raise = $6.84 Per Day*
$10,000 A Year Raise = $27.39 Per Day*
*Amortized Over 365 Days
My point here is that a false sense of satisfaction can kill your profitability.
Here is a story that relates to affiliate marketing:
I had been running an offer for months. Many months in fact. When I first started the campaign the network I was running on was the only network that had this offer, or any offer like it. I normally like to split test a few different offers to see where it converts best. Obviously in this situation that was not possible. So the campaign was profitable and doing around .15 cent EPC. I always kept an eye on the campaign and it was always profitable so I just let it be and didn’t really touch it much.
Fast forward and the conversions were declining on the offer (probably was getting scrubbed in my opinion). This got me into action mode and I started looking high and low for a comperable offer. I found one, popped it into a rotation and holy bejeeses I got a .60 cent EPC. That is a huge increase. I thought maybe it was just some lucky traffic as the first few clicks but close to 4,000 clicks later that day, the traffic held up with that conversion rate.
My complacency lost me thousands of dollars.
This should teach you a lesson. Never be complacent. Always be tweaking and you will be a success in this business.
