Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

If you are ready to join my affiliate program, you can do so here -

http://www.blogmastermind.com/affiliates/signup/

Back in December 07 I closed the doors to Blog Mastermind. The reason I did so was to upgrade the back-end system that delivered the course and the affiliate program. I’m pleased to say the upgrade is done.

I’m in Toronto now. I haven’t quite found where I am going to live (I’m with family at the moment), but I have settled back into a working routine and my focus is opening the doors to Blog Mastermind to take a new group of eager blogging students on board.

The course will open to new students again in a few weeks. I’ll let you know the exact date very soon.

What I can invite you to join today is the new affiliate system if you are interested in making money by promoting my program to your readers.

Make Money Promoting The Blog Mastermind Training Program

Blog Mastermind has been closed since December 10th 2007, so it’s nearly 6 months since anyone was allowed in.

There is serious pent-up demand for the program, so much so that I’ve already had a bunch of people ask how they can join Blog Mastermind and I’ve told them they have to wait.

This represents a great opportunity for affiliates who have an audience who are interested in blogging, making money online and Internet business. If this is you, then put aside some time in the next few weeks leading up to early June to participate in my relaunch by writing a few blog posts and mailing to your email list if you have one.

The program pays out 50% recurring commission on monthly membership fees. Our retention rate is very good because I’ve had a year to refine the training and add new materials. It’s a solid six month course and there really isn’t any blog specific training system out there like it today, taught by someone who went from no-one online to become a professional blogger.

I’ve got some great resources you can promote with, including the highly acclaimed Blog Profits Blueprint, as well as some new content just for this relaunch.

All the promo banners, links, blog articles and other resources are in the affiliate area you gain access to after you join and there are copy-and-paste options to make things easy for you.

I’ve also got something extra planned for this launch - prizes! I’m running a competition including prizes for the top 10 affiliates. Do I hear MacBook Air anyone?

All of the details regarding everything I’ve mentioned are available after you join my affiliate program. To apply, just fill out the form on this page and follow the instructions -

http://www.blogmastermind.com/affiliates/signup/

Message For My Existing Affiliates

The new affiliate system completely replaces the old one, so even if you are already an affiliate of mine you must sign up and create a new account with the new system. You also have to replace your old link with the new one you receive after you sign-up so we can track your new sales.

I look forward to working with you!

Yaro Starak
Blog Mastermind Mentor

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I’ve been affiliate marketer for almost as long as I have been a blogger and it’s amazing how much you learn as you go along.

I was very frustrated by nearly all of the affiliate promotions run on my blog during the first two years or so. Each time I published a blog post that focused on an affiliate offer I had such a poor response, on several occasions I thought about giving up blogging altogether. Yet, over time, things would prove worthwhile, as sales began to trickle in.

I expected a rush of sales after posting a blog post affiliate promotion, like all the Internet marketers talk about, and was disappointed when it didn’t happen to me. Instead my sales “dripped” in, one every now and then over the days and weeks that followed, which was certainly not as exciting as $1,000+ in 24 hours just from writing one email, as others claim happened to them.

Those early days taught me that patience is a virtue when it comes to building an affiliate marketing business based on a blog. I’ve learned a lot about what goes into effective affiliate marketing since then, yet in many ways, I still walk into most promotions completely blind and with little expectation. You never know how well something will sell and I’m constantly surprised by my results.

What Pricing Point Should You Promote As An Affiliate?

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I want to show you something. It’s a check (or cheque if you come from where I live). It’s by no means the largest check in the world, but so far for me, it’s the largest one time affiliate commission check I’ve made.

Here it is:

This check is for $4,314.34 USD. I made this money by writing one blog post and one email. That’s it.

In fact, this check is only part of the money because some of the income was paid in split payments, so I still have more to come. In total, that one blog post and email generated over $6,000 in commissions.

I’s not a six figure check or even a five figure check, but remember this is from just one blog post and one email. It’s not my entire blog income for the month, nor is it money from Pay Per Click advertising selling CPA promotions or money made from membership sites or anything else.

Just one blog post and one email. Imagine if every blog post and email you wrote was worth that much!

Best of all, this money came from selling an affiliate product so I didn’t have to deliver anything after making the sales, just deposit the money and done.

How Can You Generate Checks Like This?

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Wow, how compelling is that for a title of an article? I mean, doesn’t everyone want passive income? Isn’t that the holy grail, the promised land and the hopes and dreams of every Internet entrepreneur and would-be professional blogger?

Well maybe not, but let’s face it, we all want passive income and we all want to hear about opportunities to create it. I certainly do.

As you put into action techniques to make money online you begin to realize how truly NOT passive most ways of making money on the Internet are. In fact, I am yet to come across one income method that really is passive - and by that I mean pure passive. You set it up, walk away and it keeps making money.

True, there are systems you can set up that are low maintenance. You can even build businesses and have other people run them, but if you take stock in reality, even the best business models require you to do something. You still need to check in every now and then to make sure your employees are doing what they are supposed to.

Perhaps you don’t have employees and run a pay per click affiliate marketing business as a solo professional, sitting at home setting up AdWords campaigns for a living. Unfortunately, even the best pay per click artists still have to check on their campaigns now and then, so out the door with passive income.

Blogging as we know is not passive - far from it for most bloggers. The average blogger that actually makes money from it does it only when they perform certain actions. If you don’t write, then you don’t get paid.

Passive income is hard to generate for one reason - the world is dynamic. Human beings, some who work with you, some who you compete against, are dynamic, and because of that, if you are to do business, you must be dynamic. The only way to respond to dynamism and succeed, is to be dynamic yourself, and therein lies the work - and the end of any chance for passive income.

In order to react to a constantly changing environment, you must constantly change yourself. Changing takes work, that’s why it’s so hard to find ways to make money that are passive - sustainability requires change.

How Can A Blog Post Become Passive Income?

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When I posted my September blog earnings of $10,899.83 a few readers replied asking for advice with affiliate marketing. Given nearly $4,400 of that income was from affiliate sales - the largest single source of income - it’s easy to understand why people want further explanation in this area.

I’ll be frank with you, the area I make money from affiliate sales, is a highly competitive one, and I would probably make about twice or thrice as much money if I was doing what I do in a different niche. Selling affiliate offers to people interested in making money online is one of the hardest markets to sell in because it is over saturated and people are very skeptical. Unless you are the Rich Jerk or John Reese, two guys with huge email lists of people who love to buy Internet marketing products, you will struggle in this industry.

If I didn’t enjoy the topics of blogging and Internet business (especially combined together) and I was more interested in affiliate marketing just for the sake of money, I’d enter other affiliate markets like dating or ring tones (although these are quite saturated too) or go hunting for under serviced niche markets, where Internet marketing techniques will work even better because people are not used to them. A search of the various products you find at affiliate networks like Commission Junction and AzoogleAds provide plenty of inspiration for industries to enter as an affiliate marketer, beyond selling make money online products.

Not surprisingly, the Internet marketing industry is one of the most mature when it comes to Internet marketing tactics and as a result, the customers are over exposed to all the techniques we love so much, such as - namesqueeze pages, email marketing, sales copy, testimonials, etc. That’s not to say there is no money to be made, but you really need to be on top of your game. Other industries will be more forgiving.

I’ve been tempted many a time to jump ship after experiencing conversion rates lower than 0.1% on promotions I’ve done for Internet marketing products, although that might be more to do with the type of person I attract rather than the market itself.

The lesson here is that if you plan to enter the affiliate marketing arena and focus on Internet marketing products expect serious competition, and you better know how to find people who buy, which is an art form in itself!

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at how you can use a blog make affiliate income.

It Starts With The First Sale

The first money I ever made from affiliate marketing came from my blog. The grand total - $13 - and that was a couple of days after posting the article I had spent two hours slaving over hoping to make some big cash.

At the time I had an audience of 500 readers a day, although that may have been over exaggerated because I was using Webalizer to track my numbers, which generally provides a higher total compared to other statistics packages (Google Analytics for example shows less than half the visitors that Webalizer does). I was told about 2% is a reasonable conversion rate from people who know these things, so I assumed that would mean I would get at least 10 sales based on 500 readers.

I was like - Wow! if I can get 10 sales of an affiliate product that pays me $13 per sale, then all I need to do is write a great blog article to make $130 bucks! Do that a few times a week and you have a pretty darn good income, was what I thought to myself.

Rather than put in a half-hearted effort I wanted to be genuine and recommend something I knew was good, which I had used myself, from someone I respected and wasn’t too expensive (I didn’t think my readers had a lot of money at the time). I wrote my blog post, talked about how good the product was, used a little bit of scarcity because I thought the product offer was due to finish at the end of the month (turns out it wasn’t), published the article and then went to bed.

You can see the article here (incidentally the offer is still active - so much for scarcity!) -

Limited Time Special Price On AdWords E-Book

I woke up the next day, powered up my computer, opened up my browser and email, and excitedly looked to see if I had made any sales during the night.

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