Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

Affiliate marketing is, and will likely always remain, my favorite method for making money online. At the risk of repeating myself, here’s why every blogger should get into the affiliate marketing game -

1. You make a margin per product sale that is often as good or better than the person or company that produces the product
2. You don’t have to do any product fulfillment, handle cancellations or any customer service whatsoever
3. You have a huge range of products to choose from in most mainstream product categories
4. You can enter new niches any time you like with zero switching cost, simply by finding a new product to promote as an affiliate (this is for those of you who like variety)
5. If you have a product of your own, one of the best ways to get affiliates to promote your product is to make sales of their product as an affiliate first (this is a big one!)

I could go on, but let’s state the obvious and most important aspect: Affiliate marketing is great because you can make very good money for very little effort.

Don’t get me wrong, it requires effort to get to a situation where you can make money as an affiliate, but once you are there the actual process for making money is very, very simple. It’s as easy as writing a blog post or sending an email.

It’s Like Printing Money

I remember about four years ago reading all those hyped-up sales pages from Internet marketers, and I come across the phrase “it’s like printing money”.

I’ve never been a hater of sales copy, although obvious hype agitates me just like anyone else. I certainly believed that some people were enjoying a situation where they could just send emails and make big money, but I was personally very far away from that. Jealousy mixed with depression about my own results, were the dominant emotions I felt at the time when I read what other people were achieving apparently so easily.

My first attempt at “printing money” as an affiliate was with my blog when it was about six months old. I put in a couple of hours to write a blog post about Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide To Google AdWords and managed to print about $20 in commissions - one sale.

I was disappointed given it had taken me six months of consistent work on my blog to make that $20, however I was also encouraged. I could see given enough time and energy, that $20 could be $200 and then $2,000 and even $20,000. Today I have the audacity to believe it could be $200,000 one day too.

Fast forward to the year 2009 and the first six month’s of affiliate promotions have gone like this…

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I’ve been in communication with Nate Whitehill from Unique Blog Designs for many months now and today his team have released something that all affiliate marketers should be excited about.

Back in August of 08 Nate and his team decided to begin work on a special WordPress theme that would make life easier for affiliate marketers to create websites.

Many online marketers today use WordPress blogs as their default website content management system to set up landing pages, mini-sites and review sites - stock staples for affiliate marketers. This new premium theme makes the process of creating affiliate marketing sites a select-and-click process, much easier and more efficient than hacking standard WordPress themes or building sites from scratch using Frontpage or Dreamweaver for example.

The theme has been given the very obvious name - Affiliate Theme - and you can read more about it here -

• Affiliate Theme for WordPress

What Is Affiliate Theme?

Affiliate Theme is a premium WordPress theme with a customized back-end administration system that allows you to easily control and test the elements of your website.

I’ve had access to the theme for a few days now and had a play with the interface. If you’ve ever wanted to control the most crucial elements of your WordPress blog without needing to go in and hack the code, this is the theme you need, especially if you set up blog websites to sell affiliate offers.

Here’s a list of some of the customization options -

• With a single click you can change the entire layout from 1-column, 2-column, 3-column, 4-column, left-column sidebar or right-column sidebar. That effectively means you can test six different website layouts without needing multiple themes.
• You can control the background colors or images, font typography, homepage title and header graphics.
• You can easily insert tracking code without needing to hack your theme.
• Your blog’s navigation system can easily be changed, as well as the footer elements.
• There are settings for a featured offer on your homepage (like a highlight box) and also individual page offers.
• and a WHOLE lot more…

Frankly it’s hard to explain this using text, so the best introduction you can have is this video that Nate put together to introduce you to the Affiliate Theme -

How To Profit With Affiliate Theme

Affiliate Theme is designed for affiliate marketers, in particular marketers who use affiliate networks to find offers in many different niches they then promote with websites.

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Let me state an obvious fact about Internet marketing:

Joint ventures (JVs) are the quickest and most effective way to make a lot of sales and/or bring in a ton of targeted leads.

The reason this is the case is fairly obvious. You get someone who already has access to and a relationship with a large audience, who then recommend your product. The combination of distribution and trust, two of the most critical factors for online success, makes this marketing method hard to beat.

The only thing that beats a good JV is an internal promotion where you personally have distribution and trust, in which case the connection between you and the product itself is seamless - because it’s your product you are recommending - there is no disconnect in the mind of the audience, like there is with a JV or affiliate promotion.

Unfortunately building your own audience and establishing trust with them takes time, so if you are in a hurry, going the JV route is the best option. It’s also the quickest method to expand reach, so this is a technique you simply have to get on top of if you want to really explode your business online.

How Not To Approach People

I’m approached every week by people looking for me to promote their products. I’ve also been rejected more often than I’ve had success with my own JV approaches, so I know what works and what doesn’t from both sides of the relationship.

I often receive template emails suggesting I promote a product, which I delete before reading beyond the first paragraph. Other approaches come from genuine people, who appear on the surface to have a great product and are sincere in their intentions, yet unfortunately this approach usually fails too.

So what exactly does it take to convince someone to promote for you? Let’s take a look at the dos and don’ts of seeking joint ventures.

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Press play to begin streaming the audio or right click the text link and choose save as or save link.

Download the MP3 [ 25 Minutes - 11 MB]

Robb Sutton is the owner of Mountain Biking by 198, a blog devoted to mountain biking, a subject that Robb is passionate about.

Robb is a member of Blog Mastermind and also runs a personal blog at RobbSutton.com. He came to my attention after he revealed how he was able to score over $10,000 worth of free biking products for review on his blog. His blog is growing well and while I tend to focus on the direct monetization aspect of blogging, there’s a perk that isn’t talked about too much when it comes to blogging - how much free stuff you can get - and Robb is definitely enjoying this benefit.

It’s usually easier to get free products for review from companies rather than convince them to spend money sponsoring your blog, so this is an especially good tactic to get a reward for your hard work when your blog isn’t super big yet. Assuming the companies can see the benefit that your blog can potentially deliver, working a proactive approach to secure free goods is a good strategy, and certainly something Robb has done extremely well.

Robb’s also become an excellent review writer, which as you will hear in this interview is a powerful technique for affiliate marketing on blogs, something I’ve been doing for a long time and making very good money with.

Show Notes

• Robb explains how he got into blogging and his topic of mountain biking
• We learn how Robb is able to secure so much free stuff
• Robb breaks down his approach strategy to proactively seek free goods for review on his blog
• We learn how Robb was able to initially build traffic to his mountain bike blog, including three specific techniques that have worked really well for him
• Robb offers some feedback on how helpful participating in the Blog Mastermind course was for his blogging

Click Here to Download the MP3 [ 25 Minutes - 11 MB]

Press play to begin streaming the audio or right click the download link and choose save as or save link.

• Download the MP3 [ 35 Minutes - 16 MB ]
• Download the Text Transcript [ 18 Pages - PDF ]

This is the third in a series of case-study podcast interviews with successful Blog Mastermind students, where we look at what they do right in order to achieve above-average results.

First it was Mitch, who’s blog exploded in popularity ramping his traffic quickly beyond 5,000 daily visitors. Leigh’s interview was extremely popular as she explained how she went from making $20 to $4,500 a month with her online business. Today I interview Leslie, who made almost $32,000 in 2008 working part time online (he’s a full time teacher, and we all know how hard teachers have to work!), and has an interesting story to tell because of the unique way he makes money.

How To Make Money Giving Away Freebies

Leslie’s market is freebie offers and rather than explain how it works here, you should listen the podcast. It’s interesting that you can actually make money by offering freebie giveaways that other companies provide, and that’s how Leslie makes the majority of his online income.

Leslie has taken his expertise and transformed into into a thriving blog called The Freebie Guy. His next step is to launch a membership site and in preparation for this, he just released a new free report called - The Freebie Report - which teaches how Leslie does what he does with freebie offers.

In this interview you will learn…

• How exactly freebie trading works and how Leslie made $70 in his first DAY doing it
• How Leslie experimented with different methods to make money online and eventually found something that worked
• Why Leslie decided to start a blog and join Blog Mastermind
• What were the biggest lessons for Leslie as he grew his business
• Why Leslie wants to position himself as an authority in his industry

Leslie is not only a Blog Mastermind student, but he’s taking part in every single coaching program I have on the market as I type this. What I love about this is every week I see more evidence of how much effort Leslie is putting into his business and how much output he creates every day, DESPITE having to work a full time job.

Leslie is proof that, with discipline and enthusiasm, you can juggle your salary job as you need it to pay the bills, while you build up your online income. I expect in Leslie’s case that sometime this year (2009) he may say good bye to his job as his online income grows.

Here’s the download link again for the MP3 -

• Download the MP3 [ 35 Minutes - 16 MB ]

Yaro Starak
Loving Success Stories