Johnson.

When I signed up for Wealthy Affiliate ages ago, I didn’t know just who the hell Travis was. All these noobs were extolling the virtues of this so-called “Bum Marketer”. I wonder what this Travis was like…

He’s one of those rare kinds who possessed the grit, determination and natural talent to start off with to be a marketer. You know, someone who is good at connecting with people. I just looked up “Bum Marketing” on Google… like, 5400 hits/month! How’s that for a heap of awesome affiliate sales for Kyle & Carson?

Anywho…

I just got one of his emails. Yeah, I’m subscribed to his list. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the guy’s alright. But I’m sure it’s not just me who gets tired of his constantly happy tone in his emails. I don’t know… how many people actually feel appreciated when he finishes off his emails with, “Hope you know how much you mean to me!”

Yeah, that’s what they teach to you to be a better list marketer, but I’m not biting, you know what I’m sayin’? Sorry, I just watched “Take The Lead” with Antonio Banderas. =p

I’m not a fan of gurus. Not saying that Travis is one but yeah. Anywho, back to the email. How many people just received one called, “YOU may be in VIOLATION…” I’m sure a fair few number of you. He talks about three things in there.

Well let me backtrack a bit first. He says this:

OK, so here’s you. You’re just about finished doing everything you have to do to make sure your campaigns are going well. You’ve got about half an hour left before the time that you wrap up. Is there anything worth doing in 20 minutes to half an hour that would benefit your campaigns?

Here’s a little something you can do to if you’ve got a blog.

1. Go to the Google External Keyword Tool and look up keywords that you feel like writing about. Make sure it’s within the scope of your blog, of course.

2. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and a post you write will snag a page 1 position in Google. Start with a wide range of keywords and as you write your short posts before you go to bed every night, you’ll eventually get a feel for which keywords are each to rank for.

3. Focus on these keywords and make them the keywords that you and your blog will dominate.

4. If you’ve got a bit more time up your sleeve, write an article. This is even more valuable than writing a post, since you’re leaving a backlink on a website that probably has a higher page rank than your site does (if your blog had a higher page rank than say EzineArticles.com, then you probably don’t need to be writing articles and linking towards it anymore!).

5. Don’t aim to fill up your article with keywords. I just resubmitted some of my old articles after changing the Bio Box at the bottom and EzineArticles.com now has this new rule where the keyword density of certain keywords has to be <2%. Seriously, just write and aim to provide good information. Write about whatever you feel like, but make sure of course that it has some relevance to your website that you’re linking to.

Ideally, if you can get both done in half an hour, I can assure that if you do this every night before you go to bed, you’re going to have a very formidable and reliable blog which will have the ability to earn you a lot.

One of the hardest things about Affiliate Marketing or any sort of online or offline marketing for that matter is conducting a relevant campaign. If there’s anything I learnt from the period I was a Wealthy Affiliate member, it’d probably be that a relevant campaign is most important.

As in, it doesn’t matter if you get 1000 unique visitors a day, it’s pointless if you have a website that doesn’t answer their questions. You’d be lucky to get 1 sale. The bounce rate will be high and you’ll be losing money out of your ears. You’d rather 100 visitors a day at a 10% conversion, which is extremely high by the way. But it’s possible, if you focus on excellent, relevant marketing.

Now, in case you don’t know, I am a Science student by profession. Affiliate Marketing is one of my passions and sources of income. I’ve flipped through marketing textbooks and stuff but just like all text books, they’re way too convoluted.

I was just going to have to rely on a holistic and logical understanding of marketing. I mean sure, most of the gurus online had degrees in sales and marekting or management or whatever, commercey type subjects. But that wasn’t me. I wasn’t going to fit into this mould and I’m determined to succeed so I’m going to make it work my way.

Having said all that, everything you’re just about to read is going to benefit you most if you’re someone who started from scratch like me, with nothing but desire. Like everything I learnt from Affiliate Marketing, everything I said made sense to me and was purely derived from logic. No confusing statements, just straight-forward, “If A=B, then B=C” type statements.

OK. The first question is “what do they want?” It’s not too hard to remember. You’ve got a product you want to promote, people are looking for a solution. Join the dots. The second question is “WHY do they want it?” This addresses the emotional aspect of purchasing. I heard it first from Ann Sieg, well-known MLM specialist: “people purchase with emotion and justify with logic.” This is the part that takes practice.

I read somewhere that it takes 8 seconds for you to grab people’s attention. I actually had this idea like right now. This is where layout’s important. Your layout has to be CLEAN. It has to instill a sense of security in the person, they don’t want to feel like their online safety could be compromised by being on your site.

But to REALLY catch them in the first 8 seconds, have a killer heading, banner and a big, clear picture that makes them feel something. Don’t jump straight into the hard-selling mode, that’ll lose them. Instead, somehow link the emotion with confidence in your site that the things you promote on it will alleviate the problem.

Number 3 is “WHY haven’t they already been able to get what they want? ie. what’s preventing them from getting it?” This is where you address the problems involved and why current methods aren’t working.

Number 4 is “Is the thing I’m promoting able to take away the impediment that prevents them from getting what they want?”

Number 5 is “How does it take it away?” This is where you delve into it and go into detail. Remember to speak normally, not in a salesy sort of voice. talk to the PERSON as if you’re a mate or family member recommending something.

Number 6 is “Is it the most effective way to remove it? ie. is there any chance that the impediment might come back?” this is a way to further garner trust, to address any “hold on a sec’s” that your “mate/family member” might have had when you were explaining your thing. It shows that you’re listening to them and understand them well enough to preempt any questions they might have?”

Number 7 is more for your own sake. After going through 1-6, you should have a good idea as to the key relevance question: “so, what are we really selling, in this case?” ie, all the questions above should fall into a logical pattern that allows you to ultimately answer this question. It’s hard answering this question immediately and it sounds salesy.

Hope it helps you understand affiliate marketing better! This is really scrappy but I hope to hone this and perfect it and formalise it to make it better for people to understand. I might make it a free e-book or something. Like a “Marketing for dummies” kind of thing. It takes a while to understand, but once you get it, you’re good.

One of the biggest LOLs. It’s made my week, going into the weekend. So I just installed the WordPress.com Stats Plugin on this blog right and log in to check my results.

One of my posts, “The Real Questions Concerning Article Marketing”, got one view. Cool! So that means that my blog is getting indexed in Google. Stoked! I open a new tab in FireFox and chuck in the term that it’s ranked for, “questions on article marketing”…

Look at the 3rd entry yo! WTF??!!

I don’t know if you can see that but if you squint, you might just be able to make out the “JohnsonKee.com” link.

So the next step naturally is to go into Google’s External Keyword Tool and check up how many hits this term is getting per month.

I mean, to get an entry ranked that high only using the SEO Plugin found and WordPress.org, I doubted it would get more than 10, maybe 20 hits a day.

I was wrong.

"Not enough data"

It was virtually 0. I mean, that’s how I interpret “not enough data”, at least. The keyword is searched so little that it’s pointless keeping tabs on how many hits it receives every month.

Oh well. What was that saying? I forget what it was, but it goes along the lines of turning a bad thing into a good thing. The worse it is, the better the good thing you can derive from it.

A good thing came to me pretty much by itself while looking at this astonishing result in Google. It’ll take a bit of work, but if I do it in the long run and mix it in with a bit my more regular random posts, I shouldn’t even notice that I’m doing it.

If I’m bored and spend some time teach night, maybe five or 10 minutes looking up a keyword on Google’s External Keyword Tool, something that has few entries and little competition, then spend 20 minutes or so writing a post about it.

For the last 15 minutes, I actually did just that. I went onto Google’s External Keyword Tool and typed in a very broad keyword, “article marketing”. Then I scrolled down and saved up low competition keywords, with emphasis on “dud” keywords, that is, keywords that are supposedly searched for, even though they make no grammatical sense.

For example, people are looking up the keyword, “does article marketing”, “with article marketing” and “article marketing is”.

Hmm… another one of my ideas has just sort of sprouted out… this might actually work as something to do if you got like half an hour left and want to increase the organic power of your SEO… That’s going to be a post btw.

But yeah, I’ll get back to you. I might actually make a video out of it… once I get good at video marketing.

Dosh Dosh. Love ‘em. Not only for the fantastically beguiling anime females on the site, but more for the practical and real marketing information that the provide of the website never stops giving. He’s an example of an ethical marketer, that which I pride myself on becoming.

I just received the email from him. You know, the one that comes every  fortnight or so (a fortnight is an Aussie term meaning two weeks). Seriously, sign up if you haven’t already done so if you want some real marketing advice.

He talks about the fundamental principle of marketing, that is, building value. You cannot create a customer who returns to you if there is no reason for him or her to return to you. The only way that he or she would want to return to you is if he or she sees value in the things that he or she can get from you and he or she will only see value in the things he or she can get from you if you actually give things that are valuable to them.

Kapiche? =p

This is the fundamental question, I believe, for online Affiliate Marketers. Ask yourself this question and not only will it put you in the right frame of mind for all successful affiliate marketers, it will also force you to actually think about how to implement it:

“What is the closest thing I can give to my prospect without actually giving them the thing that I’m trying to sell?”

It’s the experience of owning and using the product!

Without giving away the product that you’re trying to sell, the next best thing you can do is, to the best of your ability, help prospects experience owning the product, without owning it.

And just remember (this is revision), when thinking about who the product is for, forget that you’re selling a product and ask yourself this 5-word question: “What are we really selling?”

One day, I’ll get as good as Dosh Dosh, but for the time being, seriously, if you’re an affiliate marketer and you know what’s good for you, join their list because you’ll be doing yourself a favour.

I actually had this little gem while taking a break from my university studies. See, I want to purpose a tablet laptop for Affiliate Marketing purposes in the not-too-distant future. Trouble is, I know nothing about them. I’m not that tech-savvy and I’d be prime catch for salespeople in a Dick Smith Electronics or a place like that.

I tend to be quite visual; I daydream a lot and, surprise surprise, I effortlessly sipped into a mini-daydream while just pacing around.

In this day dream, I walked into said computer shop. There’s a kid, you know, one of those trainees. But that’s beside the fact. I could actually FEEL how I felt if I’d walked into the computer shop right now. Yeah, that’s how vivid my daydreams can get.

The main overriding feeling that was dominating my daydream self’s subconscious was that I wanted someone to guide me. Someone who didn’t have the next sale in mind. Someone who was more of my mate than an enemy, ie. the salesperson. Someone who didn’t give a sh*t if I just left, who could actually say “cya” without worrying about the sale that just walked out the door.

So many marketers say that they understand this, but still let it slip when they’re going about their daily marketing business: people turn to their mates for advice. If you FOCUS on serving the person’s (person’s not customer’s) needs, and actually FORGET about making the sale, the sales will come. If you focus on sending over a vibe to your prospect that you’re there to give them a hand at your own expense so that they owe you nothing, then you’re creating a customer who will return to you.

This is PARAMOUNT in Affiliate Marketing. They don’t want to talk to someone faceless. They want to talk to a real person. Communicate this across and help them in anyway you can!

I just got an email today from one of the people I’m subscribed to, fellow Aussie, Colleen Slater. I didn’t really notice that she’d be quiet for the past few months until I’d received the email from her today.

Apparently, she was embroiled in her legal battle again with her ex-husband and her children, which has been going on for 3 and a half years. 3.5 years! Talk about holding a long grudge! I don’t pretend to know Colleen Slater, but anyone who can make as much as she does online isn’t someone to be messed with. The fact that love empowered her to become Australia’s best niche blogger with 0 experience is also to be commended.

The main thing here is that her income had kept on steadily coming in, WITHOUT her maintenance. That’s an Affiliate Marketer’s ultimate goal. She didn’t have to worry about looking after it and let the dough roll in

Anywho, in other news, I had another mini-brainwave today while walking down to a train platform on the way back home. Everyone says that the greatest asset that everyone has from the day that they’re born is Time. And that’s true. It’s so great because once you spend Time, it’s gone forever. There is no way you can get it back. No dumb jibes about time machines, please. Thank you.

So. How does this apply to Affiliate Marketing? Well, this should actually go into the Incantation post that I drafted last night, but think about it. If you gave people the choice to leave the page, ie. you actually said, “if at any time on this page you find it unhelpful, click out of this window. Thank you!” Be grateful for people actually visiting your site at all. I’ll refine this post later when I get around to writing my Incantation post.

The main thing I want to say about this sort of mindset is that not only does it help you bond with your prospects, it also FORCES you to become a better Marketer. Think about it. If you don’t want to waste your prospects’ time, you want to offer them the best possible information, ie. giving them exactly what they need fullstop.

You don’t want to waste your own time by spending either a short amount of time writing a scrappy review that sounds spammy and increases your bounce rate, nor do you want to spend hours procrastinating and putting up a poor review that sends your customers around in circles and inevitably off your landing page. A time-oriented focus will benefit all parties involved.

Oh by the way, if you’re a stay-at-home mother wanting to make it big in the online industry, turn to Colleen Slater for a bit of inspiration and advice!

Today I checked the Google Analytics for one of the other websites I own in the fitness niche. I worked really hardcore on it for I think about a month, just churning out article after article until I hit a relapse and had to take a break from Affiliate Marketing altogether.

It’s going well. I mean, the blog isn’t that lovely (I am not a web designer), but despite haven’t not touched it for a couple months, it’s still averaging around 10 visitors a day. I plan to do something with this traffic in July. Hey, it might only be a trickle, but trickle’s are consistent and if you tap away at the right place, you might just crack behind the place where the trickle’s coming from and BAM you got yourself a gush. =p

I checked my traffic sources. I was pleasantly surprised to see that individual pages of mine had been ranked here and there in Google, with a few first pages without even trying. Mind you, they were pages that got like 1 hit a month, but even then, visitors are visitors, no?

This is what got me. When I was doing my crazy article marketing thing for this blog, I’m pretty sure I submitted articles to EzineArticles.com of course, but the smaller article directories like GoArticles.com, ArticleDashboard.com and AssociatedContent.com. However, on the traffic page of Analytics, The only referal websites I could see visitors coming from were Yahoo! Answers and EzineArticles.com.

Hmm…

This is indisputably proof about something. EzineArticles.com is THE place where your articles have the greatest stickage; I hadn’t written an article and pointed it to my blog in like 2 months. The fact that people are still going to my blog is amazing.

So, this increases my understanding about Article Marketing and probably changes my strategy towards it:

1. The articles that go to EzineArticles.com are there  for the long run. It is important that I have links in the bio box; they will give me link juice to my blog.
2. I don’t think I’ve ever seen articles in the organic entries from GoArticles.com. ArticleDashboard.com, a few.
3. My PURPOSE of Article Marketing is dual pronged:

• Unique content on my blog so that more pages can get indexed by the search engines, and also so my blog is not just purely promotional.
• NOT SEO. The articles should be aimed to evoke emotions that help drive sales. I’m relying on the internal searching from the EzineArticles.com directory itself to bring targeted visitors to my website/blog, NOT FROM THE SEARCH ENGINES. For SEO, I’m going to rely on Video Marketing and the 10000 Backlinks Method.

It should be OK if I submit my articles to my blog and just EzineArticles.com. It’s like I’m a “fan” and just publishing something which I find is informative. Hopefully the article itself is good enough for other publishers to do the same and publish it on their own websites.

I’m happy that I’ve realised this. This further strengthens my resolve to be an ethical Affiliate Marketer, someone who doesn’t contaminate the World Wide Web, yet who is able to produce more sales than the “hardcore marketers” who would indulge in this sort of “marketing”.

=)

So tonight I was just scrolling through my mail. I’ve really got to disable that Twitter thing which sends me new adds from people. They’re usually spammers or people who want you to look at their site anyway. And they mysteriously disappear after a while.

I receive an email from Andrew Hansen, a Queensland-based Niche Marketer, just a bit older than me. He’d be 21, 22 now? Anyway, he made one of the first, if not his first video with Camtasia and made it available to his subscribers. Having purchased his e-book, Niche Marketing On Crack, I’ve learnt more about the simple process he undergoes to build niche websites that give me a little but consistent income. Actually, here’s the link to the video here. Helping out a fellow Aussie, you know?

http://highenergyvideos.com/am2/am2.html

He goes through some pretty important things in this video, especially if you’ve been wondering things like whether submitting the same article is duplicate content or not and the purpose of article marketing.

My faith in article marketing has dropped somewhat. I mean, it’s good, it requires sooo much work… I think I’m getting around 10 hits a day to one of my other blogs on fitness, but for all work, it hasn’t been worth much. Not many sales of the e-book that I was promoting. But then I guess I’m sort of losing them on the front page.

Anyway, to get back to Andrew Hansen’s video, he says a couple of things that don’t really sound that convincing. Like he says that submitting the same article to 100 article directories is OK. His logic revolves around the fact that if 100 people publish your article, then it’s obviously quality content. So, submitting your article manually to 100 directories is obviously the same thing.

My problem with that is that I’m sure the Google algorithm has something in it to differentiate a site that is an article directory and a site that puts out quality information. I just thought of something. OK look at it this way. Everyone knows that blogs are awesome ways to get your first marketing ventures up and running quickly, because of their ease of creating many pages quickly and Google’s tendency to index blog pages and respider the site quickly once it knows that that site is an authoritative site.

If you know your blogs well, you know that you can’t just simply keep taking information from other people’s websites, especially authoritative sites. Google will get suspicious and eventually and bomb your site all the way to the bottom (proof needed).

People have thought of doing this already, hence the existence of article submitters like JetSubmitter and ArticleMarketer.com. But another question comes into the balance. Is it worth the time (or money) getting the same article submitted to these lower article directories? There’s a reason that these articles directories are at the bottom and I for one think it’s because they are the dregs of the article marketing tea cup, the last resort that article marketer’s submit their articles to. I for one believe that having your article bought by a publisher and having that backlink displayed on the site would be more “valuable” than having your article submitted by you (or someone you paid) at a lower article directory. So it seems like page rank comes back into the equation.

I guess in the end, a few things do come to mind. Andrew Hansen is a respected and successful Niche Marketer. Far more so than I am. He pays (not much) to have his articles written and submitted for him, so they are all unique. He condones submitting one article to many article directories, so we can presume he does it himself. I’m sure there is a direct correlation between his success and his endorsement of his choice to submit one article to many article directories. There was also a case on EzineArticles.com I think I read, where a guy manually submitted his article(s) to like 100 article directories consistently and got some awesome rankings as a result.

I mean, in the end, results matter. In an ideal world, you’d want to be able to write an article, or have an article written for you, just 1. The article would have to be virtually perfect: naturally SEOed, emotive, visual, funny etc. It would have to be picked up by publishers and be on page 1 of Google, needless of Digg or social bookmarking sites to get it up.

Does such an article writer exist?

In conclusion, this video, for me, has caused more questions to arise that should be answered:

1. Is there any value in submitting one article to many article directories, ranging from good to bad vs submitting one article to only a handful (or one) article directory only?
2. Is there indisputable proof to back this up?
3. Does the existence of article submitters prove that there is value in doing this?
4. Is there anyone who has had great(er) success simply submitting one article to 3-5 article directories per day, say?
5. Is this an effective way to achieve automation of a marketing campaign?

Yesterday was one of my university mate’s 19th birthday. Happy Birthday Johnno! We ate at dinner at Stalactite, you know, the place where Marcos Bagdhatis was said to have eaten in that year he went all the way to the grand final at the Australian Open. I think it was 2006. It’s corner Lonsdale and Russell St for anyone who wants some good Greek cuisine.

I always enjoy spending time with my mates. They make me who I am and even though they’re not perfect, I do love them. I try not to take them for granted.

Anyway, some of mates had to go to play indoor soccer and I ended up going with the rest of the cohort to Crown Casino, Melbourne’s premiere entertainment venue. It was the first time I’d actually entered the gambling section of Crown. I felt like I was someone important when the security guard took my licence, looked at me and waved me in.=p

It could have been the overindulgence in giro (Johnno said it was the same as kebab, except it’s on a horizontal stick, like a spit) that made me feel somewhat sick while being in the casino. Mind you, there was good reason that the section inside could have contributed to my wooziness.

The first thing I noticed was how oppressive the air inside was. It was stuffy and even though I like being warm, the kind of warmth that emanated from the casino was suffocating. It was long inside. Rows and rows of pokies occupied every open space. There must’ve been at least 300 of the machines chinking away. The deeper I walked, the sicker I felt.

I was mesmerised by one of the roulette people. He would’ve been our age. He looked young. His clean-cut, no-nonsense approach to the game was impressive, but I just thought, “man he must be bored.”

There was an old guy on a stage who was playing a “The Price Is Right” kind of game, matching up numbers in a certain order to try and win some money. There were a gaggle of onlookers crowding around but the applause was cued.

Everything felt so fake. I had to escape.

I went out from the other end of Crown that I came in from, feeling considerably sicker than when I came in. I could feel the bile building up between my teeth. My walking broke out into a pace, which built up to a jog. I ended up running the length of the Casino in an effort to reach the toilet before I threw up.

I never did actually throw up. The running did me some good. Sucking the air in helped clear my airways. I ended up sitting outside, next to the Yarra, letting the cold, Autumn night roll over me.

That was when I remembered some things I was thinking about when I was waiting to go to my mate’s party. Just walking through my beloved city, I get little hints, little encouragements to remind me why I’m on the path of an Affiliate Marketer. There was an Asian guy, pretty big for being an Asian, wearing the pink Donut King uniform. I could feel him looking at me as I walked on buy and I sent out a vibe of sympathy for him.

Then, I was walking on Little Lonsdale street I think it was. China Town. It’s on the same street at Maxim’s cake store. Anyway, there was a guy handing out pamphlets.

As an affiliate marketer, I’m never going to have to do those things. I’m never going to be forced to wear some dorky uniform and I’m never going to have to shove pamphlets down the throat of people who don’t want to be hassled. Sure, I might send out things occasionally of a promotional nature, but the only difference is people will have a greater degree of choice to avoid it. Not that I would rely on to a great extent anyway.