Leaving For Las Vegas
Tonight I’m heading to the bright lights of Las Vegas and no, it’s not to gamble and drink since I don’t do either, although I do intend to see a Cirque Du Soleil show.
This is my first trip to Las Vegas and the main reason I’m heading there is for a special invite-only mastermind session with the top affiliates from the recent Product Launch Formula 2.0 release from Jeff Walker.
Normally I’m no where near the top of the affiliate standings but recently I’ve been able to get into the top 30ish area quite consistently, peaking at top 15 for StomperSMARTS and making the cut for the special invite to the mastermind with Jeff and his partners for the PLF 2.0 launch.
Here’s a list of some likely attendees in Vegas -
- Rich Schefren
- Tom Ham
- Mike Filsaime
- Tom Beal
- Joe Jablonski
- Ed Dale
- Colette Marshall
- Mark Widawer
- Brian Clark
- Willie Crawford
- Jeff Dedrick
- Tim Houston
- Michael Cheney
- John Carlton
- Stan Dahl
- Shawn Casey
- Ray Edwards
- Greg Poulos
- Dave Mizrachi
I’m looking forward to meeting some of these people in person, who I only know from names on websites and in emails.
Sedona and Chicago Next
After Vegas I’m renting a car and doing a road trip to Sedona for a brief holiday, then driving on to Phoenix for just long enough to catch a plane to Chicago. I’ve got a couple of days in Chicago then I’m back home to Toronto where I move into new house down at the beaches.
Throughout this trip I’ll have my trusty video camera and hopefully get a chance to do some more wandering entrepreneur posts, so stay tuned.
If you want to keep up with the latest details on this trip, make sure you subscribe to my Twitter feed.
How To Motivate Affiliates To Promote For You
I just finished watching (actually listening to the MP3 version) of the video conversation between Jeff Walker, Eben Pagan and Frank Kern. The video is one of the resources Jeff released free from his “road trip” around the USA interviewing marketers who have done big online launches.
If you haven’t seen any of the videos, head to the product launch formula website and enter your name and email to gain access to the video and MP3 interview with Jeff, Eben and Frank. It’s free and Jeff’s stays on topic when he sends mail, so you won’t get hit with pitch after pitch once you are on his list.
If you haven’t watched the first video from Jeff where he interviews John who makes $9,000 a month from a business selling a board game about medicinal herbs (!) - you can find that video and the full story in my previous post here -
$9,000 a month from a board game
I won’t recount the entire video with Jeff, Frank and Eben but there was one point they brought up I wanted to discuss further because it’s something that is often overlooked by people doing a launch. These techniques are part of what Jeff claims are new to the 2.0 version of the Product Launch Formula and it’s safe to say no one else is looking at this to the depth Jeff is.
What are we talking about? Your affiliates - in particular, how to motivate them to promote your product.
The Greatest Source of Traffic Is…
Most of us poor bloggers have a mentality akin to the working class when it comes to building traffic. We toil day-in and day-out, pumping out content, building little channels of traffic and slowly creating an asset. We hope to retire one day leveraging our years of previous effort and follow the slow-and-steady path to success.
That’s a fine way to go about building an Internet business - that’s exactly how I did it and in time, it can be very rewarding - BUT, there are others who don’t have the patience to go through the slow process of content production and marketing, and instead look for quicker ways to reach an audience.
Marketers who have released products online understand that their affiliates, in most cases, drive traffic and sales. Affiliates are definitely an integral part of a launch process because they help bring in traffic, usually much more traffic and better quality traffic than any other source available online today.
As an avid student of how to build traffic online and also a teacher attempting to offer my students the quickest methods to deliver traffic results (since you are all so impatient!), I’ve studied information products about traffic generation and watched with interest how people market things on the world wide web.
Whenever I purchase an Information product related to making money online, the first page I turn to is the one about how the person built an audience. I have to know how exactly they attracted the traffic necessary to generate sales. In most cases, this is where the real nuggets of value come from and where the real gains can be made if you apply the advice to your business.
After years of research, study and practice, it’s pretty clear that almost every marketing expert agrees that your affiliates are the greatest source of traffic you have. You can look deeper into this and qualify the difference between joint ventures, host beneficiaries and plain old affiliate traffic (each source of traffic is of different quality), but that’s not something we will look at in this article. What’s important is if you want to succeed online today, you need to understand how to leverage affiliates.
