Every year the leaves change here and as marketers we need to change too. Times change and you either change or die. I am old and bald but not ready for that.

Have been looking at my affiliate marketing efforts and as things have changed so do I need to change. A few years back it was relatively easy.

There were not 14 launches each week and no one had heard of bonus wars. Boy, have things surely changed.

For me it is time to rethink how I do affiliate marketing. Some things need to change and to do well you have to be a step better in your relationships.

First is to get away from launches. Yes, they work and occasionally they are items that will help my subscribers. These, unfortunately, have become the exceptions.

The majority of items I have seen launched are not things I would use and some of the marketing they are using is sketchy to be polite.

You know the ones I am talking about. The outrageous claims and super low initial price where you go through up sell hell.

Now I am not against up sells and believe in the “would you like fries with that” principle. It adds to the bottom line but all too often the initial purchase is just a barebones tease then you get the “you really need this and this to make it work.” Have seen that one time too many of late.

Add in the exit pop hell that some use and sending my subscribers to some of these sites is a guaranteed unsubscribe and if they don’t they really should be. I am not looking out for them with this am I?

Time to find quality products and set up complete funnels for them. The key is evergreen products.

To set up a proper funnel and follow up system is a lot of that 4 letter word work but if you pick something that would be a good value next year you can set up your process and just leave it run.

So for me it will be a year of very little participation in the big launches and more about setting up complete funnels for the products that I like and use regularly.

Follow what I have learned from Marlon Sanders in his Promo Dashboard and then set up traffic sources to them.

Time to create residual income from stand alone funnels. What about you?

Will be talking more about the actual set up in the future here.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses PLR to enter various niches profitably.

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, evergreen products, exit pop, funnels, initial price, marketing efforts, Marlon Sanders, outrageous claims, word work

Marlon Sanders has just released a new video that is worth your time to watch. In it he explains the steps necessary to create killer promotions.

He covers all the necessary steps to do just that.

What he does works and he is the king of step by step marketing.

Check out the video today.

Marlon’s New Video

Not sure how long he will have this available so go watch it today.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses PLR to enter various niches profitably.

Technorati Tags: marketing, Marlon Sanders, promotions

Do I Need a Website to Be a Successful Affiliate Marketer?

Copyright 2010 – Mike Paetzold – All rights reserved

Whether you need a website or not to be a successful affiliate marketer is a very common question I get. The answer is yes and no.

I know not what you wanted to hear. It really depends on how serious you are about your business.

I say no because you can get started using free resources but you will need a web presence. This can be a blogger blog, a Squidoo Lens or similar free site.

Blogger is probably the best to use because it is the most flexible. I know people who just use free sites and can make a nice living. There is a risk though.

Blogger and the other free sites can and do delete sites and you have no recourse. Blogger is probably the most forgiving but if you are building a long term business you really need to have more control of your business.

If money is a problem this is a great way to start but as soon as you start making money you will want to get your own domain/s and hosting.

Having your own domain and web presence is always the best way. There are a lot of things that you can do with your own hosting that you can’t do with the free options.

The most important thing is that it will not disappear as long as you pay your hosting.

It is easy to install a WordPress blog onto your site. It is flexible enough with the various plugins and themes available to be any type of site you may need.

So you do not have to have a website of your own but it is recommended. Either way you will need to have a web presence to be an effective affiliate marketer.

For more information on how to build a complete marketing funnel and create an effective long term business check out Get Referrals Fast.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses PLR to enter various niches profitably.

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketer, blogger, complete marketing, free resources, referrals, squidoo lens, web presence

Have to laugh when I was reading a post at Netmarketing Forum. You can see the post here if you want.

A lot of people complaining about how it is not fair to the little guy with how launches go. They were upset because of owners mailing about new programs that come online.

After all they don’t think it is fair and that program owners have an unfair advantage. And they do have one but only because they earned it.

If you are looking to be very successful online the real key is to get other people to promote you.

Yes that is the key. Don’t ever forget it.

Get Other People To Promote You

The real secret is that the people that usually are on the top of any promotion and that get the lion’s share of commissions usually have the same profile. They have members or affiliates that promote their programs allowing them to build big lists.

They all have products or programs that other people drive traffic to. Because they have done that they have the ability to drive a large amount of traffic to promotions when they want to.

Now the easiest way to do this is with a free membership site that has good converting upsells and pays solid commissions.

That is one of the reasons we pay up to 75% commission on Get Referrals Fast. Depending on the offer someone you send takes and your level you can make up to $147.75 per sale.

I have a free report that can help you called “10 Shocking Facts About Membership Sites“. Grab it with no optin needed.

Now why would I give you a gift like this?

I want you to be successful and able to drive large amounts of traffic and if I can help you do that I would hope you would help promote some of my products and become one of my top affiliates. This way we both benefit.

It is in my best interest to help you because then you will have the ability to help me in the future.

Grab your copy of “10 Shocking Facts About Membership Sites” and apply what is in there. Do it right and you will be the one with the “unfair” advantage.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses PLR to enter various niches profitably.

Technorati Tags: free membership, launches, membership sites, promotions, referrals, unfair advantage

If I were to guess (notice guess not assume as that is a bad word here) most of the readers here use affiliate marketing in some way shape or form. If I am wrong (and sometimes it happens oh say 3 times a day or more ask Maude she will tell you she always tells me ) then no need to keep reading. If I am right then lets get into some things to help you.

3 Tools You Need In Your Affiliate Marketing Arsenal And Why

Most of us get started in affiliate marketing when we first join a program or buy a product and get introduced either through the download process or the follow up process to affiliate programs. It is usually said as Make money recommending us to others. Just send traffic and make money.

Sounds really easy “just send traffic” or some variation like that. So you do it. All of a sudden you go into research mode and look for how you can get traffic. After all that is all you need isn’t that what they just told you?

The truth is that what they have told you is only a partial truth. They want you to think it is easy and they want you to send them traffic. If your traffic does convert they are more than happy to share the profits with you. Then you get cut out of the equation after that. Before I go any further you can actually be successful this way but the odds are against you and even if it works you are giving up a large part of your potential income.

That is why you need to have these 3 tools and do more than just send traffic.

The 3 tools are…

• An autoresponder
• A tracking solution
• A web presence

Before I get into this lets look at what a good affiliate marketing system looks like.

Your traffic should go to a squeeze page that adds people to your list first. Then you can send people to whatever your offer is. It is a bit more work but you can show one visitor not only the offer you started promoting but other related offers as long as they stay on your list. Now there is a lot more to doing this than shown on that quickly put together mind map but the power is in being able to follow up with them.

So an autoresponder is necessary to be able to run this system. It will allow you to automate the follow up and get started towards creating that big red easy button we all are looking for. (That big red easy button only works once you have built that big responsive list and that takes a bit of that 4 letter word – WORK.)

You need to be tracking what is happening or you have no idea what is working and what is not. You need to know how much traffic you sent and what traffic is converting.

Finally you need a web presence so you have a place to host your pages for your squeeze page system. This will allow you to maximize the process and track much easier.

Now there is a cost for being able to do this but it is a necessary expense. You can get all 3 of these tools and more for about $20 a month through The Marketers Hosting.

This is the overview of how you should be setting up your affiliate marketing instead of trying to send traffic direct.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses PLR to enter various niches profitably.

Technorati Tags: affiliate programs, autoresponder, hosting, marketing system, squeeze, tracking, traffic, web presence

Time is money and both should be used wisely.

That is why not taking action in the next 24 hours could cost you more.

If you are an affiliate marketer a blog is one of the must have tools that you need to pre-sell your offers and generate traffic.

The problem is that it takes a number of steps to do it right so many can’t be bothered.

Last Wednesday I released a step by step plan to walk you through each of the steps and make sure you get the most from your efforts.

Profitable Blog Steps

As I stated when I launched it the price is increasing to $47 after the initial week and at that price it will still be a great value but if you take action now you can get it for just $27.

Profitable Blog Steps consists of 10 modules that will walk you through each topic from the initial research (an often skipped step) to ways to use viral techniques to multiply your efforts.

Here is what one of the early members says…

“The modules are a stroke of genius. I was able to quickly and easily discover your secrets to putting together quality blogs and making them sell.”

Jay Hines – EasyViralPDFBrander.com

Check out Profitable Blog Steps before the price increases and start generating more affiliate income quickly.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses PLR to enter various niches profitably.

Technorati Tags: affiliate income, affiliate marketer, blog, blogs, price increases

Yesterday was a long day for me. My son had a tumor removed from his head so I spent all day at Hershey Medical Center. Looks like everything went very well so despite being a very long day it was a good one.

When I got home last night I went right to the Thursday night conference at Get Referrals Fast where my partner, Jerry Reeder was doing a seminar on standing out during a launch.

As most of our members of Get Referrals Fast use traffic exchanges we used the launch on Tuesday of TE Command Post and how we differentiated our offer from the 100 other jv partners that were promoting it.

You can see exactly what we did and how we did it on the blog post I did about TE Command Post on launch day.

We used a video walk through of the features and created a very unique bonus for those that upgraded through our links. It did a couple of things.

We showed the value of the service with the video and gave people a reason to get it from us rather than the other people promoting it. We bought a domain and set up a special page to highlight our offer.

These are not new techniques but taking the time to actually do them makes a big difference in how to set yourself apart. Especially during launches this is extremely important.

Here is another example from my friend Joel Osborne. I just released a new product on Wednesday – Profitable Blog Steps. One of the swipe emails I created for my launch partners talked about the old adage How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Joel took that a step further and I recommend you go see what he did. His promotion is below.

Subject: Mike, watch out for those angry pink elephants… from Joel Osborne

How do you eat a pink elephant Mike?

Oddly enough, I have an answer to that in a short video…

http://instantvideowebpages.com/play/elephant

Whether you are trying to eat an elephant or if you
are trying to set up an affiliate blog to make some sales,
there are some important things to keep in mind.

Enjoy
Joel Osborne

Don’t worry if you don’t have a lot of time right now,
the video is very short, but feel free to bookmark and share it.

http://instantvideowebpages.com/play/elephant

Do you think his promotion stood out from the other affiliates promoting Profitable Blog Steps?

It is important to do things that set you apart in your promotions.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses PLR to enter various niches profitably.

Technorati Tags: get referrals fast, Jerry Reeder, Joel Osborne, jv partners, launch day, pink elephants, Profitable Blog Steps, te command post, traffic exchanges

If you’ve been using your WordPress blogs to earn affiliate or Adsense revenue and your income hasn’t yet progressed to the level you’d hoped, I believe there are only a few reasons why. There are a small set of mistakes that are so common they might account for the failure of 80% of affiliate bloggers or more. Here’s what I believe those mistakes to be…

It can’t be overstated how important is the market you enter as a blogger/affiliate to your eventual success and level of revenue. Everyone tells us this, but far fewer folk tell us exactly what the perfect kind of market is to enter and why. Here’s a hint:

Affiliates and bloggers only make money serving markets where money is spent. It’s all well and good to know that a group of people online have an interest in quilting, but does that automatically mean that you can make money from a site in that market? I don’t think so. I don’t think quilters are the biggest or most passionate spenders. So what’s better?

The formula is simple: The most profitable markets for affiliates are those where your target audience has a desperate passionate interest in a specific product or group of products that you as an affiliate are able to share information with them about. Read that again if it didn’t sink in. If it doesn’t describe the market you’re in, it might be time for a change.

That’s mistake number one.

Mistake number two is to do with HOW you serve the market you’ve chosen. What determines how many sales you make as an affiliate is how well you provide your target audience with the information that they seek. That means knowing specifically what information it is that they seek, and providing it to them in a way that integrates the purchase of products that they’ve already expressed a desire in or an interest for.

You know specifically what they want (talking specifically about search engine markets) by the keywords they’ve searched. The longer or more specific their search keyword, the more specific a desire they have, and the easier it is for you to fulfill that desire. When you find groups of people with specific desires that relate or are integrated with their use of products or services that you can provide them as an affiliate, you don’t need to do any selling… the person is already sold, or will sell themselves as you provide them with the information that they’ve already told you they want.

Click here to learn more.

Doing affiliate marketing this way becomes a very different game. It cuts out your sleazy selling, it cuts out the need for excessive affiliate links, aggressive ad placements, and other annoying marketing tactics, and maybe most importantly, makes your traffic generation efforts more easy than ever.

Knowing that these mistakes are the biggest contributors to people’s failure at making money with their blogs, I sought to create a resource for affiliate bloggers that would unquestionably allow them to beat these mistakes, by getting this work I’ve been talking about done FOR them.

In other words, I thought I’d go out myself and find great niches for people, find profitable affiliate offers, and the perfect content to turn them into commissions, so people could just take it, plug it in and start to profit.

What came out was Plug and Play Niche Cash, that you can check out at the link below. Unfortunately it’s strictly limited to 500 people only, but it’s set to be the saving grace for lucky affiliate bloggers everywhere.

If you want to accelerate your blogging success, grow your blogging income faster than ever and beat the rat race of people trying to make it in this business, this will be an invaluable investment.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses PLR to enter various niches profitably.

Technorati Tags: adsense, bloggers, blogs, profitable markets, search engine, search keyword, target audience

There are a lot of things that you need to do to create an internet business. Some of those can be quite time consuming so finding ways to automate some of the items is key.

Lately there have been a few launches that can help you. The first was just released yesterday and is free.

Jeff Dedrick released a program that will create an ad rotator that is constantly improving. You can add banners to any site and they will rotate a variety of Clickbank products for the topic you choose. The good thing is it is much more than a rotator as it keeps track of which banners are generating clicks and increases the views of the best performing banners for you automatically.

This saves you the time of constantly tracking and finding products to add to your site and will over time improve the results you get for that piece of web realty. Check it out at Automated Traffic.

The second one that launched last week was Affiliate Silver Bullet. This allows you to get all the pieces necessary for a complete affiliate promotion set up the right way.

This means you get already set up squeeze pages and funnels to properly sell a variety of Clickbank products. Setting up your own the right way with all of the features they add would take you forever. This way you can be set up in minutes instead of days. Check out their video at Affiliate Silver Bullet to see what all is involved.

The last automated system I wanted to discuss today is a program I created with my partners to allow you to easily start building your list – Get Referrals Fast.

This allows you to start building your list even without hosting and still monetize the process as you generate subscribers.

All three of these allow you to automate a lot of the process and just add traffic.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses PLR to enter various niches profitably.

Technorati Tags: Affiliate Silver Bullet, Automatic Traffic, get referrals fast, list building, systems

I have been recommending Affiliate Silver Bullet but have had some people ask questions about applying it. After all like anything else you can buy the perfect solution (well, maybe not perfect) but anything you buy you do need to have a way to use it.

Most of these will apply to Clickbank Pirate with the exception of the first one. The only down side of Clickbank Pirate was that you could not collect the leads. Some of these you will need to drive direct traffic and for others you will leverage traffic you already have.

The first way will be to download the bullet and set it up on your site tied to your autoresponder. This is best if you need more lead generating systems and who doesn’t?

They provide the pages, host the videos you just need to integrate it with your own autoresponder. There system is very automated to work directly with Aweber which will be the easiest to use and how I will do it.

You can use another autoresponder but it may take a bit of tweaking to get the form to work properly. Drive direct traffic to these pages and you will have a lead generator already set up with 25 email follow up series. You can edit them anyway you want although I have found that not to be necessary other than creating my own tracking links for the urls.

The second way is to use the various thank you page ads and add them into your current lead generation funnel. These can link directly to the Affiliate Silver Bullet system or to the bullet that you set up. I prefer in these cases to add them into their system as I will already have these people as subscribers and I know from using Clickbank Pirate that they will continue to email these leads after they finish the preset emails. This has created numerous commissions on new Clickbank launches that I was not participating in.

The third way is to integrate them into any membership site you have. Use the thank you page ads in the same way as you would in your lead generation systems. Offer them from a bonus page, add them into your login page or use them as login offers if your membership site supports that. All of these are excellent ways to get additional traffic and potential commissions from existing traffic. Membership sites do not have to be hard to create and you can find out more about creating your own membership sites in Membership Tactics.

The fourth way is using various content methods to add people to your bullets. Whether you blog, use article marketing or both. Linking to the appropriate bullet whether hosted by you (best in this case) or them is an excellent use for your second link in your article signature file.

Make sure that they are on topic for what you are writing about and you have an additional possibility for commissions.

So if you have been thinking about trying Affiliate Silver Bullet there are 4 different ways to take advantage of the opportunity with this system.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses PLR to enter various niches profitably.

Technorati Tags: Affiliate Silver Bullet, aweber, Clickbank Pirate, commissions, lead generator