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One of the popular email questions is always, “How did your earnings shoot up so much over just one year?” If you remember, I posted My One Year Anniversary in affiliate marketing. I did have some pretty awesome growth in my first year in this industry, and I’m pretty proud of what I’ve accomplished. The main reason I started this blog was to share my trials, failures, and things I’ve learned in the past year, while also doing things like posting my earnings to motivate you guys and show everybody that success is truly possible. In light of that, I’d like to share some of the reasons why I think my growth happened as fast as it did.

Motivation

This is probably the main reason behind why anybody does what they do. You have to be motivated to have success online, it has to be something you want to do and strive to achieve in every day. Without motivation you’re not going to be productive or profitable. My initial motivation was to make enough money to quit the horrible part-time jobs I worked while going to college. Once I succeeded at that, my motivation was to make enough to be able to be a full time affiliate marketer once I got out of college. Once I got to that point, my motivation was to make enough to just put a hold on school and make as much money as I could, as fast as I could. That’s still the driving factor that motivates me to this day. It also leads to my next point…

Goals

The best way to accomplish something is to set a goal, and then work towards that goal. My first goals were to just make enough money to pay for gas. Once I achieved that, I set new goals and worked towards those. Back in the summer I told myself I would take a year off of school, and if I wasn’t making $100,000/month revenue by June I would be going back to school. Now school just isn’t for me, so I wanted more than anything to accomplish that goal. Because of my motivation coupled with the goal I set, I was able to completely smash that goal with well over 6 months to spare.

Fearlessness

I set some pretty aggressive goals for myself. I was a FLAT BROKE college student who in less than a year wanted to quit his part-time job, drop out of college, and run a multi million dollar business. If you have similar goals and want to be serious about them, you have to just let go of everything and run your business with no fear. In the early stages I was down to -$300 in my only bank account because I had overdrawn on my debit card to pay Yahoo. It was stressful, definitely. But I didn’t panic and just pay off that debt and then quit internet marketing. I sucked it up and gave it another go, and eventually I built up some savings. This again happened many times, and happens to this day. Things are great, and just like that they can really go downhill. A couple months into it I was doing pretty well, and my main campaign almost completely died out and started losing money. I could have very easily just called it a “good shot”, and walked away with the few thousand dollars I had made in that couple months. I wanted to achieve my goals though, so I had to be fearless and think of another way to make money.

Networking

Networking is definitely a major reason I’ve had success. Without networking, I wouldn’t have met/spoken with some of my biggest contacts. You could go back in my networking time line, and if you cut out one person here or there, I could be making only 5% of what I do now. Networking was suchhh a big reason I had as much success as I did. That’s why I strongly advise to hit up events like Affiliate Summit and ad:tech no matter what income or skill range you’re in. The contacts you can potentially make are absolutely invaluable…simply can’t put a price tag on it.

Time

I don’t even want to think of how much time in the past year that I’ve stared at a computer screen. For the first 6 months I was on a computer from the moment I woke up, until the moment I went to bed. I’d wake up and head to college…all through classes I’d just be sitting online on my laptop. During breaks I’d be on my laptop. I’d get home and work on my laptop until 3 in the morning. The only tangible thing in my life at that time was my girlfriend. Now I don’t spend as much time, but I do spend a lot of time working. I’m on the phone all the time with people now, and now it’s more of a communication game. I have the skills to crank out whatever I want in a pretty short period of time, it’s just making the connections to really turn those skills into results.

Blogging

I do attribute a lot of my affiliate success to blogging. It’s proven to be a great networking tool, and as stated before; networking is key. Instead of always having to go out and find contacts, because of my blog they know who I am, and can come to me. It also gives me some credibility so that when I talk to people, they know I’m not some newb looking for bread crumbs to fall from the table. It’s a bit blunt but true, people treat you differently.

My Girlfriend

AweeeeeeeeeeeeeeEeEeEe!

Seriously though this one is true. There were more times than I could count where things were too stressful for me. Trying to get online to make money is hard sometimes when you know you have -$300 to your name. My girlfriend was someone to talk to and help keep me together during the many times life was too stressful. If you don’t have one (or wife), I recommend you start looking. I’m always here for comfort if you’re losing money, but unfortunately I can’t be there to snuggle with you unless you’re willing to fly me first class.

Family/Support

Family was also key in my success. My parents were indeed upset when I had no money but kept telling them to have faith, and that I knew what I was doing. But they still were able to front money here and there to pay for my broken down car repairs as well as giving me a place to live. I would have been in some financial trouble if it hadn’t been for my parents. So family is an important factor, whether it be your blood family or friends that have become your family.

I’m sure there’s more to it, but that’s all I could come up with. This late night writing makes me ready for sleep hah, but hopefully this gives you guys some insight as to how I’ve grown so quickly over the past year. It’s not saying “Well I did it because of [this] campaign using [these] keywords…” That would obviously be stupid on my part, but all of what I said was true, and these were all the factors that made all my campaigns and keywords possible. Do you have the mindset of a millionaire?

Have a good one.

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We all want to be as uber as possible and make the most money possible, so you should act like it. In order to be truly uber, you cannot care about money. I’m sorry but you just can’t always be worried that “oh I’m tight on money I don’t think I should do this.” This mostly relates to offline purchases, and is something I’ve learned through experience.

Here’s an example, say you’re working on a crappy desktop with a 12 inch screen. Every day you probably think “man it’d be really nice if I just went all out and got dual 30″ monitors and a MacPro, work would be so much easier.” So do it! You can be thinking “oh I’d do that, but I don’t really have the money”…getting the new computer will make you work 10x as fast because of the speed, and 10x efficient because of the screen space. You’ll make your money back in no-time due to the increased productivity. Technical productivity aside, you’re going to feel awesome when you go all out and buy a sick computer. You’re going to be psyched up and want to work on it. Say hello to more productivity and more profit.

If it’s going to help your business or mentality…DO IT. Get the $1,000 office chair if it’s going to make you 5x as comfortable throughout the day, working in a crappy chair is going to make you uncomfortable and less productive. Get the Blackberry or iPhone if it means you’ll be able to read and respond to all your emails while you’re sitting at the doctors office for an hour, so once you get home that’s all out the way and you can just get to work. Get the top notch fax machine if it means you’re not going to have to sit and spend 20 minutes every other day trying to send a fax on a cheap crappy machine. Get the top notch grill if it means you’ll be able to cook your chicken twice as fast. The list can go on and on…people are too worried about losing all their money if they buy things that are the best; so worried that they don’t think at all about the fact that down the road this is going to make them more money.

Personal examples? One is with my computers. For the first YEAR of work, I worked on my eBay used 12″ iBook G4. It was slow…the screen was microscopic…and a lot of software didn’t work right with it. Looking back this is one of my dumbest early mistakes. If I had taken my first $5,000 profit and bought the computer I have now, I’d probably have an extra $20,000 sitting in my bank account. I finally just went all out and got the upgraded MacPro with 30″ cinema display. I now don’t have to click back and forth to get IMs, I can edit huge Photoshop images without having to scroll all over, and I can have multiple browser windows up so I don’t have to log in and out of different gmail/affiliate accounts. I’m literally 10x as productive with this computer as I was with my iBook.

Another personal example…my phones. I had an iPhone, and I loved the internet/email on the go. Problem was, it didn’t get service in the basement where my current office is. So every time I got a business call (which was every day), I’d have to run upstairs to talk. I was constantly running up and down, up and down alllll day long. What a complete waste of time that was for me, I could have been taking my calls at the computer while I was on the computer so I didn’t have to say “Hold on for a sec I have to run to my computer and check.” But I still loved checking my email and blog etc when I was out. So I bought another phone from Verizon, where I get fine service in the basement. The extra $80 a month is well worth not having to constantly be running all around my house, so I just use both phones. iPhone when I’m out and need to check email, and Voyager for talking on.

Moral of my story here? If you really want to be an uber affiliate, you can’t be cheap…because uber affiliates aren’t cheap. Buy the best because it’s going to save you from time and hassle down the road, and ultimately make you more productive, and happy. I mean this just goes with anything in life. Let’s say you’re a construction worker. Tool Set A will cost you $500 but the tools are cheap, don’t work that well, and break easy. Tool Set B will cost you $15,000 but the tools are top of the line, faster, and don’t break. With Tool Set B, you’re going to be able to build houses twice as fast. Twice as many houses will pay for itself x100 in a few months. In reality it’s not going to be that big of a difference, but it definitely will help productivity. So it looks like it’s a lot smarter to get the ridiculously expensive tool set because after you build a few houses you’ll already have paid for the tools plus much more.

For us affiliate marketers…go with Tool Set B.

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Now that 2008 is here, it’s time to stop saying “well this is what I want to accomplish next year”; it’s time to actually accomplish it. So putting a little thought into it, I came up with some things that I’m going to do better this year. Perhaps you’ll take some ideas from my list and put them into your own as well.

1) Better Accounting

This is going to be an easy one. I started off in the internet game not having an accountant, and knowing nothing about the topic in general. I kept track of my own finances terribly (printed out every screenshot from every traffic account, paypal receipt, everything…stacks of paper). This year I’ll be registering another s-corp probably for the stuff I just ran under my name last year, and keeping track of thing much easier (just put everything on a business credit card). I have an account now too, so it’ll be much easier as I won’t be keeping track of much :).

2) Better Tracking and Organization

Right now I track just using Adwords and Google Analytics, which does get the job done. But, having my own personal tracking software built with many of my own customizable options would always be better. Some of you guys have actually given me free accounts to software that does such, but I don’t like uploading anything of mine into somebody else’s server :). All of my campaigns are organized pretty well, but I haven’t had a system built that will automatically do everything I want it to for me.

3) Less Leisure Time

Don’t get me wrong, enjoying the perks of your job and relaxing is a great thing to do (that can actually make you more money), but lately the more money I’ve been making, the more I’ve been slacking. Basically all of December I did virtually NO work besides maintenance that takes 30 minutes/day. To do this I’m doing to start making a monthly (or possibly weekly) To-Do list using Tadalist.com.

4) Expanding Into Other Areas

I was (and still am) kind of hooked in the PPC game this past year, figuring it out and whatnot. Now that I’ve pretty much got the hang of it, I’ll spend less time “learning” what to do. I’ll be able to start and optimize campaigns much faster, which leaves me with some more time. I want to look into some other areas of IM and web development in general. I have some ideas, and right now it’s just a matter of putting them into action.

5) Become More Disciplined

I’ll just be honest with you guys…I’m lazy as hell. This year I’m going to crack down more on myself and quit being lazy about things that will make me more money. For example : I have a campaign that was making around $300/day, and it randomly completely died out over a month ago. I’ve been too lazy to go and simply tweak a couple things and re-upload the campaign, because I’d rather just work on other things making me more money. Even though it would only take me 20 minutes, I’ve just been plain lazy.

So there’s a quick little list of things I’m going to make sure I do better this year. Hopefully if you suffer some of the same symptoms as I do, we can rectify these things together.

Now that the new year is year I’ll be blogging more frequently again, so I’ll talk to you guys soon. Hope you had a good new years.

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I was going to finish off the series with talking about getting money from biz dev guys, but all of the points I wanted to make are very similar to the post on getting money out of affiliate gurus. So instead I’m going to talk about luck when it comes to affiliate marketing.

I’ll answer a couple basic questions first, and then expand. To become a super affiliate, do you need any luck on your side? No. Are some super affiliates where they are because of luck? Yes. Now the point is arguable whether or not it did take some skill to “stumble upon” something lucky in the first case, but some affiliates simply found the right thing at the right time.

I’ll start off with an example of luck…me. Back in the day when I had first started (I’ve talked about this before), I started with ringtones. I saw a different offer that wasn’t ringtones, and thought “Hm, maybe the keywords for this offer would work for ringtones”. I tested some things out and voila, they keywords were pretty great. 0 competition and $2.00 EPCs. Now I did have to have some skill to put the campaign up and then expand on my keywords…but I was a noob and I got lucky. Without the money I used to make from ringtones (that doesn’t really exist anymore), I was able to fund further projects and exponentially skyrocket my income. If I hadn’t found those keywords and made some money, would I have found other ways to make money to get me where I am today? I don’t know really, I probably would have, but at the time I couldn’t get anything else to work other than my lucky ringtones. Did I get super lucky? Yeah. Would I have made it big time without those keywords? I think so, but we’ll never know.

Where is your golden nugget?

You may be the next one to find a lucky batch of keywords for the right offer. You never know until you think outside the box. I’m talking to the point where you can’t even see the box. Think crazy, brainstorm ideas, and then put them to action.

I can’t get lucky and don’t want to.

Most people don’t get lucky and find that golden niche. Does that mean there’s no chance of them being a super affiliate? It sure as hell doesn’t. Generally speaking, the higher up the affiliate tier you rank, the less luck there is involved. High octane campaigns require loads of research, testing, tracking, and loss. You can certainly make more money off of strategically approaching your campaigns. Here are the general outlines of strategically setting up a large scale campaign :

1) Research and find a potentially profitable niche. For some, potentially profitable may mean making $100/day. For others, potentially profitable may mean $100,000/day. Either way, you have to find a niche where there is money to be made.

2) Research what networks carry what offers, and start discussing payouts and payment terms. The next thing I’ll do is shop around for offers. I’ll tell my affiliate manager a niche I want to enter, and tell them to give me the top 5 offers. EPCs, conversion rates, payouts, and what payout I can get. I’ll then boil it down to 1-2 offers from a couple different networks (different networks have different tracking systems that “magically” shave leads).

3) Research what other people are doing in this field. I get ideas for landing pages, call to actions, colors, themes, etc.

4) Research what sorts of keywords I’m planning on bidding on, and what position I want. I need to know how much volume to roughly expect, what negative terms to bid on, and how much I’m going to be spending.

5) Set a budget. I’m launching a campaign in the next month or two where my starting budget is going to be $5,000/day. I have to make sure I have the money set away so I don’t run out of money.

6) Get the landing page built, keywords set up, and all my tracking set up.

7) Launch the campaign at midnight and let it run throughout the day. If anything is seriously wrong, fix it. If not, keep letting it run to pull data.

8) At $5,000 spending/day, I can compile a nice amount of data in a week or two. Then it’s time to analyze what’s converting the best, and what isn’t profitable.

9) Split test until I’m blue in the face. Ad after ad, landing page design after landing page design. Getting the best CTR and conversion rates possible.

10) Scale and enjoy. Once you have the optimal ad, landing page, and keywords, it’s time to scale and test out different traffic sources.

That is a very rough guide to setting up a campaign, if I went into detail I would be here writing all night long. The point I’m trying to make is : luck can be great and can kickstart you into profiting, but it’s certainly not necessary if your goal is to become an uber affiliate. Now it’s time to go play some Halo 3…if any of you guys play leave your gamertag in a comment and I’ll friend you.

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