affiliate marketing

Why You Need To Try Affiliate Marketing

I just made Success Entrepreneur’s list of the Top 87 Affiliate Marketing Blogs and Bloggers That Can Make You Rich, and could not be more excited. If you have any interest in digital marketing as a career path, profession, or source of income, you need to try affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing teaches you how to be a truly scrappy digital marketer, a marketing entrepreneur on the highest level.

No Corporate Safety Net: Affiliate Marketing Will Test You

As a corporate digital marketing executive with 12+ years experience, I have managed some of Silicon Valley’s largest digital marketing budgets, most advanced teams, and most intricate systems. However, large operations can provide the marketer an incredible safety net.

By contrast, most affiliate marketers have very limited budgets (or no budget), very lean teams (just themselves during certain hours of the week and maybe a freelancer or two), and little technology (other than free tools like Google AdWords editor).

Without the corporate safety net, you are forced to become the most scrappy marketer around. You are forced to get really clever, efficient, and effective with the cards you are dealt. In some ways, it’s liberating because you can literally test anything and you’re the boss. In other ways, it’s frightening because you’ll either sink or swim, and will likely pivot your strategy a multitude of times before finding success. If you are in the digital marketing profession, consider ditching the corporate safety net in your spare time and trying your hand at affiliate marketing. It will truly transform your entire outlook on digital marketing.

My Edge: Affiliate Marketing Generates The Best Corporate Ideas

If you work at a larger enterprise, initiatives are planned well in advance. While there is some flexibility to test and get creative, you often don’t have freedom to go completely wild (and for good reason). As an affiliate, you can test anything. It just so happens that the most wacky ideas often become the most successful strategies.

I love affiliate marketing because it has driven my success as a corporate digital marketing leader. Without the multitude of hours invested as an affiliate, I wouldn’t have driven as much success on the corporate level. Affiliate marketing continues to teach me the lessons that propel my career because I bring those lessons to the corporate world. I test on my own time with my own business and only bring the best, winning strategies to corporate. Affiliate marketing is my edge in the corporate world.

Extra Income: Affiliate Marketing Puts Cash In Your Pocket

If you’ve been reading PPC Ian for a while, you probably know that I love saving money and investing for the long run. It also happens that I live in the incredibly expensive San Francisco Bay Area. I personally look at affiliate marketing as an extra source of income, a way of generating savings that can be further invested in my future.

I recently wrote a blog post called Your Margin Is Made on the Margin describing the exponential value of each additional dollar saved and invested. Even if you don’t make a lot of money from affiliate marketing, any marginal income generated will truly impact your life from a long term investing standpoint. And, you can work from the comfort of your own home while building skills that directly propel your career.

If you have not already tried your hand at affiliate marketing, I hope today’s post encourages you. I want to sincerely thank Khalid from Success Entrepreneur for featuring my blog, it means the world to me. Please check out Khalid’s list and the 86 other successful affiliates. Each one has a unique story and lesson to share.

Image in this post © SuccessEntrepreneur.org

SEM Jobs: A Guide For Affiliate Marketers

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Aug 20 2

One of the best things about blogging is all the great emails I get from you guys! Lately, several full time affiliate marketers have asked me the question, “What should I do to get my first corporate SEM job? That is a great question, and today I’m thrilled to share a few tips on getting SEM jobs, specifically for affiliate marketers.

Tip 1: Leverage Your Affiliate Marketing Skills

Affiliate Marketing

Corporate search engine marketing jobs offer a very different experience than affiliate marketing. At the same time, affiliate marketing provides a great introduction and education that will help anyone become a great corporate marketer. My advice to any affiliate looking for an SEM job: Leverage and embrace your background. Stay true to your affiliate roots! During your interviews, consider bringing in case studies from your affiliate campaigns. I’ll never forget the candidate who brought in a portfolio, complete with Google Analytics and Google AdWords reports/graphs from his very own website (that he had built and marketed himself). I definitely respect someone like that and am betting a lot of other hiring managers have the same perspective!

Tip 2: Make Sure You’re Ready For Change

SEM is the best career path around, in my opinion. SEM is also an amazingly intense career path. Meaning: You will be working around the clock. Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter are 24/7 marketplaces, they never sleep. If you’re an affiliate (and love PPC), you will love the work so this should be a breeze. However, you can’t do everything and you’ll likely need to ramp down your affiliate operations. Your new SEM job will be priorities 1, 2, and 3. Make sure you’re ready for that change. Mentally, you cannot be thinking about anything at your new SEM job than the job itself. The caveat: Don’t completely stop your affiliate marketing, it can be your competitive advantage and your pulse on the industry. Affiliates are savvy and my personal affiliate marketing efforts have helped accelerate my corporate career.

Tip 3: Focus On Professionalism

Due to the number and nature of “super affiliate” blogs on the Internet, affiliates have become the rap stars of the online marketing industry. Don’t get me wrong, rap music is my favorite. However, gold chains and the party lifestyle don’t mesh will with the corporate world. Just keep in mind that corporate SEM is all about professionalism.

Tip 4: Just Go For It!

In my opinion, corporate SEM is the way to go. Affiliate marketing is great, but I personally feel like corporate SEM takes it to the next level. You will be working with some of the largest budgets around. You will be optimizing to new levels. You will work with amazing bidding platforms. You will learn some serious creative skills (both ad copy and landing page creative). You will get to test new stuff all the time. You will get amazing exposure to some of the brightest minds around. You will become a world class businessperson, responsible for your company’s bottom line. These are just a few benefits of corporate SEM, I could list hundreds. If you’re interested in making that move, just go for it!

Image in this post © marekuliasz

Making Your Affiliate Marketing Business Legit

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Nov 20 10

Since today’s Sunday, I’m going to blog about affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is what I do on weekends and my limited spare time (via IJL Productions LLC) when I’m not enjoying the corporate world of online marketing. Today, I’m thrilled to share three tips on making your affiliate marketing business legit. I’m talking about getting a private mail box, setting up a toll free number, and forming a corporate entity. Once you have reached a little bit of scale (you’re making a few thousand dollars per year in profit), I would highly recommend making your business legit via these tips.

Affiliate Marketing Business Tip 1: Get A Private Mail Box

One of the best moves I made for my business is setting up a private mail box at my local UPS store. For only $275 per year (fees are different per UPS Store location), I get my own physical business address. You heard me right! Private mail boxes, unlike PO Boxes, are considered legitimate business addresses. While it’s just a mail box, it’s considered a physical street address. This is super important as every real business needs a physical location (especially if you want to share your address with customers and also set up a corporate entity). PO Boxes (while useful in their own right) just don’t cut it. Your home address won’t cut it because you want to separate your personal life from your business 100%. Private mail boxes are the affordable solution of choice in my opinion (although you may also want to look into renting co-worker space that offers a physical mail address, as that’s getting popular these days too).

In addition to being a real address for your business (separate from your residence), private mail boxes provide a number of other benefits. For starters, you can list it as your business address when you purchase domain names. I used to register my domain names privately because I did not want to use my home address. When you own hundreds of domain names, private registration can become quite expensive. I’m saving hundreds per year now that I can list my private mail box as my address.

Another major benefit: You can list your private mail box as your business address on your website, especially on your privacy policy, terms and conditions, and contact us. The rules around privacy policies and transparency are getting stricter over time. Personally, I think this is good because it’s making the Internet a better place and raising the bar. Why not stay ahead of the curve and offer your business address? In my opinion, this is a move that can also make you look more legit in the eyes of search engines (meaning better SEO ranking).

Also, the guys at the UPS store are awesome. They’re open long hours and 6 days/week. They will sign for packages that come in and then hold them for me. I even get an email when a package has arrived. It’s like having my own staff.

Affiliate Marketing Business Tip 2: Get A Toll Free Phone Number

This tip really goes together with the first one. These days, it’s super affordable to get your own toll free phone number. I’m paying $10 per month for my toll free phone number. There’s a lot of flexibility in how you set it up, but I’ve decided to just have my calls go to voicemail. Then, I have the voicemails delivered to me via email. A lot of the calls that come thru are junk, but some are not. Now, I have a great way for people to contact my business without giving away my personal cell phone or home phone. Of course, you get all of the benefits just mentioned above with the private mail box: separation from your personal life, a number you can list publicly in your domain name registration and on your website, and of course convenience.

Affiliate Marketing Business Tip 3: Create a Corporate Entity

Tip three is really a continuation of the first two. Now that you have a physical business location and dedicated phone number, you’re ready to completely separate your affiliate marketing business from yourself. Now, it’s time to form a corporate entity. There are many options, but I personally decided to go the LLC route. LLCs are great. They separate my business operations from my personal self. They are relatively affordable (only $800/year fee to own a California LLC and another $100 year to pay for a registered agent service). They are easy when it comes time for taxes (a single member LLC is disregarded as a corporate entity for tax purposes so income flows through to your individual tax return). If my business grows and I hire employees, I’ll need to rethink my strategy. However, from my current vantage point the LLC provides the perfect corporate entity for my situation.

After setting up your private mail box, toll free number, and LLC, you’re not quite done. At this time, don’t forget to open a business checking account and credit card in the name of your LLC. Use the tax id of your LLC when opening the accounts up. Leverage your private mail box and your toll free number as your contact info. The key thing to remember: Your business is no longer part of your self. It’s separate entity so it’s time to make it legit and go all out with this process. Once your business is fully separate from yourself, you have opened up an exciting world of possibilities. You’re now ready to embark on your next round of growth and hit the big leagues of super affiliates!

Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer nor tax advisor, before forming a corporate entity always make sure to consult with your own legal/tax counsel. The information I provide here is just my personal experience and is not legal nor tax advice.

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Affiliate Marketing That Works

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Sep 27 6

Many affiliate marketers are facing headwinds in 2011. Strategies that once worked in prior years, especially the hard sale, are not working as well anymore. However, I’m here to say that affiliate marketing works, perhaps better than ever. Case in point: I earned nearly five grand on EPN in 3 months in my limited spare time above and beyond the income from my demanding full time job. Since I wrote that post, my overall EPN and affiliate marketing earnings in general continue to thrive and grow.

I’m not the only one. There’s a new class of affiliates and today I want to share an affiliate marketing strategy that works in 2011, via case study. In particular, I’m going to highlight a personal experience I had with my friend Eric’s blog, My 4 Hour Workweek. After reading this post, I encourage you to sign up for a leading affiliate network such as EWA Private Network (they’re accepting 10 new affiliates right now) and then get out there and employ this strategy!

So What’s This Affiliate Strategy?

The strategy is quite simple in theory, but difficult in execution. It’s all about establishing an honest voice with your readers, making it very clear that you earn an affiliate commission when they purchase via one of your links, but offing such an overwhelming amount of value that users make a conscious effort to buy via your link. How do you do this? Very, very hard work and an amazing level of transparency with your readers. You can’t leave an ounce of doubt in anyone’s mind. You need to exclusively recommend products you personally use and prove over and over why the product is working for you. You need to go well above and beyond to provide tremendous free value. You need to avoid mistakes (such as the hard sale) at all costs. Once you’ve done that, your readers will feel an emotional tie to purchase via your link. They’ll owe it to you!

Let’s take an example. My friend Eric from My 4 Hour Workweek promotes this awesome peer to peer lending network called Lending Club. Each month, Eric publishes an income report that highlights his sources of online income and passive income, including Lending Club (check out his August report for an example). I’m honestly addicted to Eric’s blog because of his level of transparency, honesty, and value. My favorite posts are his income updates. As a reader, Eric has established a personal connection with me.

So, I had been meaning to sign up for Lending Club for quite some time. Not only because of Eric’s blog, but also because my former boss is the CMO there and I’ve read an amazing amount of good stuff about the network as a source of diversification and passive income. I’m a busy guy (it’s hard to find even a half hour to sign up for something like this) and I’m all about efficiency. As such, when I finally had some free time to sign up for Lending Club, I could have just gone directly to their site. Or, I could have searched the Internet for special offers and coupon codes in an attempt to get some kind of freebie. However, none of this even crossed my mind. I quickly remembered how much value Eric’s blog provides and my decision was simple: Sign up via Eric’s affiliate link! I even went as far as commentating on Eric’s blog to let him know I used his affiliate link. Now, that’s an affiliate marketing strategy that works. If you’re trying to make money online in 2011, I highly recommend a similar approach. It truly works and it’s also how I make money online.

Image In This Post © My4HrWorkweek.com

I Made It To The Affiliate Top 50

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Feb 2 15

I just learned earlier today that I made it to the Affiliate Top 50. What’s the Affiliate Top 50? It’s an exciting list of the top 50 blogs on the Internet about affiliate marketing and making money online. This list includes the really big names in affiliate marketing such as Shoemoney and John Chow. (As a side note, you may wish to check out my review of John Chow’s book.) It’s a true honor to be on this list (I’m #35), and I truly thank you for your support in reading my blog!

How Is The Affiliate Top 50 Calculated?

So how is the Affiliate Top 50 determined? This list looks at a variety of factors including your Google page rank, Yahoo site explorer inbound links, and Alexa score. Then, it puts these factors into an algorithm and calculates an overall score for each blog. That overall score then determines the order of the list.

As you may know, Google recently updated page rank. My page rank is now 4 and I’m sure this factor certainly helped placing PPC Ian on the list. One thing I also noticed is my Alexa score has room for further improvement (at 208,255). I’m expecting an improvement over time as more people visit my blog. Moreover, I’m considering placing an Alexa badge on my blog, something that would certainly improve my Alexa score, but not sure yet because I also like my clean blog design.

I’m super excited about my inclusion in the Affiliate Top 50. It’s not only an honor, but it’s also great PR. PPC Ian has been getting some great PR lately and I’m a big believer in PR driving great SEO results. Thanks everyone for your support!

Exclusive Interview With Dino Vedo

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jan 8 11

I’m thrilled today to interview one of the top commentators on my blog, Dino Vedo! Dino Vedo is a very popular blogger in the affiliate space, I frequent his daily and have learned numerous affiliate marketing tips from Dino. Above and beyond his blogging expertise, Dino is a full time college student and a young millionaire. Very impressive stuff! It’s been a real honor getting to know Dino over the last year, he’s a great friend and business partner. I know many of you reading PPC Ian are interested in PPC careers. Dino is someone you’ll want to pay close attention to because he can definitely teach you some strategies than can help with your online marketing career. Without further ado, let’s get into the interview…

Please tell PPC Ian readers a little bit about yourself

I’m currently a student at University of Michigan and I’m super busy juggling both affiliate marketing and my school work. College life is fun, don’t get me wrong, but it can get quite overwhelming when you need to attend clubs, hang out with your friends, study for tests, and then check over your campaigns before you go to sleep! Most of my friends have no idea how to make money online, nor exactly know what I do. Most of them think the only way to make money online is to scam, but as we all know that definitely is not the case. Anyways, I’m studying in the School of Business at U of M, and later plan on transferring maybe to a different University as this will be only my sophomore year and I’d hope to get into a much more prestigious school to finish my studies.

How did you get started in affiliate marketing and blogging?

For me, it all began around 3 years ago, when I was just turning 16. My mom encouraged me to start selling stuff on eBay to make some money as I was always asking her for some and apparently she got sick of it. Ha. A good friend of hers was already selling a lot of things on eBay and already was well experienced with how eBay works, and agreed to help me get started. After weeks of selling some of my old stuff around the house, I came to see the huge potential in this and wanted to expand and make a lot more money just like any teenager at that time would. So I ended up going over to Liquidations.com and buying huge amounts of auctions in bulk, such as electronics and video games and who knows what else. On a per item basis, the items were being liquidated for only a few bucks, and I knew I could sell them for maybe double or triple for what I got them for. So that is exactly what I did, and in a few months I quickly became a eBay Power Seller, and before I knew it my basement was turning into a large scale warehouse! At that time, I was making a few thousand per month with minimal work. Sure you had to take pictures of the items and write descriptions and then ship and package them out, but I honestly did not mind as I liked what I was doing and was making good money with it as well.

But of course, after around a year of two of this, all good things came to an end. PayPal had limited my account and froze my funds inside the online account. Not only that but since they work directly with eBay, they had my listings closed, and my eBay account was put on hold. Now why did this happen? My eBay account was in good standing, I had close to 5K in positive feedbacks and close to 98% positive feedback. Well, at that time eBay was going through drastic changes in their policies, and numerous sellers were complaining. If you had an eBay account a few years back, I’m sure you can remember that the eBay feedback system was completely fair. By that I mean the seller and buyer both had the right to leave positive or negative feedback. But that was changed a few weeks before I got in trouble, and the reason, my best guess is (as eBay or PayPal aren’t allowed to tell you the reasons..) that I had too many bad reviews or ratings in a short time frame. Sure I was an eBay Power seller, but eBay at that time did not care, or was their system broke? I have no idea but they ended up limiting my account and ruining my business for a good month or two. I was able to get the account back after I had verified that the stuff I was selling was legit and after I sent numerous paper work to prove it.

So problem solved huh? Nope not at all. Since eBay closed my listings, some items were in transit and some were sold and not shipped yet. So what does eBay do for those buyers? They send them a message stating that the seller may have been fraudulent and they are investigating him. Wow thanks eBay right? So imagine what happened, I got even more negative ratings and feedback, some complained they never got their item when they paid, which at the time was true, but there was nothing I could do as PayPal froze my funds and said not to ship anything until the investigation was complete. So my eBay account was in horrible standing afterwards, and I could barely get a sale and ended up giving up after that, enraged at eBay.

As an entrepreneur at heart, I never admit failures, but rather look at them as opportunities to learn or to make something better out of it, and that’s truly what happened. I ended up reading about other ways to make money online, read tons of eBooks on various subjects such as internet marketing and blogging. Starting creating websites and products, and before I knew it I was making just as much, if not more than on eBay. Not to mention, it was much easier to do as I had no items to ship, and no customers to deal with! Now it was all just a matter of scaling up, learning more, and trying out different affiliate strategies to get traffic, whether it was paid or through organic searches.

How are you able to balance your coursework in college with Internet marketing?

This is definitely hard and I would be lying if I said anyone can do it. I do believe that anyone can learn internet marketing and make money online, but to attend college and do it at the same time? No definitely not easy to do and you can trust me on that. Being a full time college student and living there is hard to start with, but now add girls, partying, studying, more girls, homework, tests, more girls… alright I think you get it by now and see where I’m getting at.

But yeah, it definitely is hard to do, and I manage it somehow. I’m always in class multi tasking. I think that is the biggest difference from me and another student. I have my laptop whenever I got to class, and I’m always doing something on it, while listening to the instructor. Risky huh? It sure is but I’ve managed to listen and learn, while optimizing campaigns and reading up on new posts on blogs such as Ian’s! So take it from me, it can be done but its hard!

When you graduate, do you plan to get a job or pursue affiliate marketing full time?

I really don’t know about this one. I guess whatever happens, happens. I enjoy what I am doing now, so if I get job opportunities that are similar and I see that there’s a huge potential in it, I may as well bite. But to say that will happen anytime soon, would be a lie as I see myself being self employed and working from my own home/office for the next few years for sure.

What advice do you have for affiliate marketers in high school or college looking to make it big online?

Perseverance and determination is key in my opinion. I see lots of my friends wanting to do what I do, they start asking me what is best they do first and this and that. I’m a good friend so I tell them what to do and how to do it right. But after a few days of maybe losing money or not making what they hope, they give up and say its impossible and pointless. I think that’s the attitude of around 99% or so of everyone who tries to make money online and fails at it. So if you fail, look at what mistakes you made learn from them and try again. If it fails again, reconsider what you are doing and research a better niche or try something else. The opportunities are so vast, that if you give up it truly is no one but your fault.

What are your long term goals?

To make lots and lots of money. That and enjoy the internet lifestyle and all the good things that come with it. I really enjoy networking with people and learning about the successes and failures of others. It truly is the best way to further your understanding of how affiliate marketing really works and how to be successful. I also plan on expanding the niches I am currently in, develop a few authority sites, invest in more domains, create a few products to help people out, and who knows what else…

I also plan on moving out from Michigan as soon as I finish college or transfer. I hate the cold climates and would do anything to be able to live in a place like California, so you can definitely count on seeing me there in 2-3 years. Specifically a city such as San Francisco. I’ve heard lots of internet marketers are there and there are lots of things to do, both on the entertainment and business side.

What’s the future of Internet marketing?

The future is what we all make. Sure some say mobile and some say applications like on Facebook, but who really knows. There could be a shift in the mobile industry that changes it for good, maybe Facebook dies off, or maybe the internet and SEO changes? Most would say yeah sure, but if you look just a year or so ago, everyone was on Myspace and it was huge. Now in only a year, Facebook is bigger than Myspace and even bigger than Google in traffic. Would anyone have guessed this? So the future is really in our hands, and is truly what we make of it. With that, be the future and create something that will change it. I’m sure there is money to be made in that…

Check Out Dino Vedo’s Blog

Dino, awesome interview! Thanks so much. I thoroughly enjoyed the interview, you’ve got some amazing stories, accomplishments, and true value to share with the online marketing community. PPC Ian readers, you’ll definitely want to check out Dino Vedo’s affiliate blog.