I just wanted to post somthing quick as we are geting ready to head out for a meeting here in a bit. Do you have so many projects going on that your going crazy? Does your brain hurt after your day of work? Are you busy or are you overworked?
Even when you work for yourself you have to surround yourself with creative productive people that keep you on track. What do you do to keep your projects on time and stop yourself from burning out?

productive or busy

One of the first things I ask when joining an affiliate network is… Do they pay? I dont know about you, but alot of the networks around either Skim your sales, Don’t have adequate tracking of your sales, Or just plain don’t pay.
Shoemoney, Uberaffiliate and others say join as many networks as you can, you never know who will have the higher payout, or the better conversion rates. I agree with them to a point, but if network A has a 35% better payout than network B, but Network A pays me once every two months, OR they dont pay at all, thats alot of wasted money. I use a handful of networks and will be doing a review on each of them in the next couple of weeks. Until then, ask yourself “Can I trust these people with my money?” because lets face it, You made the sale, they owe you that money.

Sometimes we can spend too much time on the computer, networking, or just running our businesses. Motivation is why 85% of new/small businesses fail. Most people out there, myself included, get the once in a lifetime idea to do somthing, multiple times. The problem is follow through. With summer approacing how do you plan on keeping your motivation?

This past friday, Koncept J launched ModelColumbus.com. The launch party was held at Sugar-Bar hosted by one of the greatest club promoters around VIP Tiffani of Klever X.

Everyone had a great time, Here are some photos of the party.

Going into this year’s Affiliate Summit West, I wasn’t looking towards anything spectacular and didn’t have any big aspirations. I was excited about being on the “Advertising on Facebook” panel, but had no idea how beneficial it would end up being.

During the first day of the summit while walking through the meet market, I was surprised to see that Facebook had their own booth, along with plenty of staff members from the company. Not only were these members from Facebook, but they were actual team members from the Ads department and they actually understood the frustrations we have been experiencing with the Facebook approval process and their advertising platform.

I met with almost all of the members from the company, but spent the most time with Alex Shultz who is the head Marketing Exec at Facebook and also has a deep background in affiliate marketing. While in the meet market we ended up talking for about an hour and it was great to hear about the changes to come.

The next day Alex Shultz, Dan Murray, Myself and ShoeMoney were on the “Advertising on Facebook” panel. The room filled up quickly and ended up with standing room only. In addition to answering plenty of Q&A from the audience, the following points were discussed.

- Shoemoney briefly talked about how he is using Facebook Ads for local advertising and driving leads for car dealerships and dentists in his area. This method of advertising is extremely new and lucrative because barely anyone is doing this.

- There is a misconception by some that Facebook has a “college crowd”, but this is so far from the truth. There are currently over 150 million members on Facebook and some of the fastest growing demographics are over the age of 25.

- Facebook members from NON-US countries are one of it’s fastest growing areas, with Italy recently leading the way. Foreign clicks are cheaper along with less saturated.

- When setting up a new campaign, make sure to test multiple images and text headlines. Alex mentioned that the TEXT headlines of ads actually factor more in the overall CTR than the image used.

- While other social networks may start at .10 or .25 per click, it is possible to receive clicks in the .02 to .04 range. Price factoring comes down to a click through rate and cpm process. Continually tweaking and improving your ad campaigns for a better click rate, will result in lower click costs.

- Cloaking links is not fooling anyone at Facebook. They are aware of “black hat” methods and are in the process of taking actions against these advertisers and accounts.

- When Alex was asked what offers he would run on Facebook to make money, he said “dating” and “weight loss” offers are always in the top performers.

Overall. the “Advertising on Facebook” panel went well. More than anything else, I was thrilled to see Facebook made the effort to attend and put themselves out there to get real user experience stories and feedback. They know the ball is now in their court and they have made mistakes in the past, but are working to improve the system. There is no easy fix and this will take time, but improvements are on the way.

I know Alex and the Facebook team will be looking over the comments in response to this blog post, so please feel free to leave any comments, complaints or improvements you feel would be useful.

So it’s been a GREAT while since i have posted on this site. I have been a little busy building some side projects of my own, one is ohioaday.com because if you live in ohio, you need to be reminded at times like this (blizzard) why you love ohio. We are also building a new photography studio at the westland mall, I’ll have picts up in the next week or so. Thank you my loyal readers for sticking out this long while with no love.. things will be returning to normal soon.

I almost forgot, I’m finally updating this blog to wordpress 2.2.2, it’s about time. Also I’m changing Koncept J from www.KonceptJ.com/site/ to www.KonceptJ.com/photo/ and should be done any day now.

Bow wow performed a small show at Riverwatch, for the OSU vs. Penn St. Game, Here are the shots.

As I continue to grow my affiliate business, it can be very hard to stay focused.

I have a million and one things I could do in a given day and at the end of the day, there is always more to be done.

So in order to not make projects take years to complete, I force myself to stay focused.

The method that has been working really well for me recently is taking a small period of time each day and making a list of things that I would like to accomplish and ideas for future projects.

I then try to categorize them into urgency using an A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, etc method. I get all the A projects done and then move onto the B’s and so on.

Keeping an organized list of things needing to be done can really increase productivity and reduce time it takes to launch (potentially) profitable websites. The more I launch, optimize, tweak, study, etc the more money I make, the closer I am to my goals.

How do you stay focused and efficient?

So one of the big reasons the majority of affiliates fail is because they don’t really get serious. This could be because :

• They tried once and failed.
• They don’t have the time (between a “real” job, kids, etc).
• They don’t really believe a living can be made with affiliate marketing (believe it or not I could find hundreds of people who would call me crazy for saying you can make $20k/month with affiliate marketing).
• They’re simply not smart enough.

So what’s stopping you from getting serious? You have to believe that you’re going to succeed no matter how many times you fail to get there. Here are some ways to make sure you’re serious about making money with affiliate marketing.

1) Set a Serious Budget

You’re not serious about affiliate marketing if you plan on spending a $25 PPC voucher to test and calling it a day. If you want to be serious, you have to be ready to invest a serious amount of money. How much money is ultimately up to you, but I would try to save up at least $1,000 before you give affiliate marketing a real go. In many cases it can take much more than $1,000 to find something that’s profitable. If you take $25 and don’t find anything and stop, you’re just going to quit when the money keywords could be in the first $200 you spend. So start saving now, set aside a bit of money from each paycheck and start your own fund. Sell some of your stuff on eBay. Or do some grunt work for people to make some cash.

I personally set my budget to around $300/day and run it at that testing things until I get the campaign profitable (in which time I up the budget to unlimited).

2) Set Serious Time Aside

You’re not going to get any productive work done unless you set the proper time aside to do it. Despite how easy and time efficient affiliate marketing can be, these cases are ones of luck, very good connections, or knowing exactly what to do. This probably won’t be you, it’s not most people, so you have to make time to set up your campaigns, ensure you’re tracking EVERYTHING, and then constantly look over stats, test new pages, ads, keywords, anything.

Maybe you have a full-time job now and a family at home to take care of and time can be the hardest thing to come by. Just like with exercise or any other activity, you have to manage your time properly. Maybe it means cutting out your favorite TV show. Maybe it means (kindly hah) asking your spouse to cover for you for an hour or two every night, or in some cases maybe it means sacrificing an hour of sleep every night until you get things rolling. Either way, affiliate marketing takes time and is NOT easy money. But if you put the hard work into it, you can certainly reap the rewards.

3) Set Up Serious Tracking

Setting up a serious campaign doesn’t mean throwing together 5,000 keywords in a few semi-targeted ad groups and testing which ad has the highest click-through rate. As stated before, this can be done and is only successful in cases where you’re plain lucky. For the rest of us, we have to break down EVERYTHING in order to find out exactly what’s working and what’s not.

This means tracking :

a) Keywords – weed out the ones that aren’t converting.

b) Ads – test ads for the highest click through rate while making sure that they convert well.

c) Landing pages – test different button colors, headlines, page styles, etc. Track the CTR and the conversion rate of each page style and then decide the most profitable one. Once you know what “type” of page converts, start testing the smaller things like headlines, colors, content, and pictures.

d) IP addresses – block out IPs with multiple clicks to your ads. Google may prevent your ad from being charged, but if you have a ton of clicks from an IP it probably means it’s another affiliate, and by blocking them they don’t even see your ad up there anymore – making them not see your higher CTR ads and just preventing them from spying on you.

e) Offers – test out different offers from all networks, and then when you find the best converting offer, test that offer out between networks to see if there’s any shaving occurring. Stick with what works best.

4) Have Serious Faith

As with a lot of things in life; ya just gotta have faith. You’ve seen the big checks and screenshots from myself and others, and while I can’t promise you that all of them are real, I can promise you that all of mine have been real, and there’s nothing THAT special about me (aside from my devilish good looks and charming ways). There’s nothing stopping you from going out there and accomplishing your goals but you. Set a goal to quit your day job, to make a couple hundred bucks a week on the side, or to hit it big and buy your dream home with affiliate profits. No matter what the goal, just know that it is in fact possible, it just takes hard work and, you guessed it…getting serious.

5) Have Serious Common Sense

You want to know the best way to accomplish all your goals and hit it big in affiliate marketing??? Get out there and do it! This has been said a bazillion times before but I don’t care, if you want to be serious you have to have serious common sense. Reading a hundred eBooks, blogs, and forum posts isn’t going to deposit large wire transfers into your bank account. Creating campaigns and testing is going to do that. My free affiliate marketing tutorials will give you all the basic knowledge you need to get started. After you know the basics, just get in touch with your affiliate manager, pick out an offer together, and devise a small plan of attack. Then it’s all about YOU, and getting out there and testing properly.

Common sense also applies to your strategy. Don’t let a campaign get into your head…if you’ve spent thousands of dollars and tested out everything you could and couldn’t break a profit…accept it and move on. Only a VERY small fraction of the campaigns you test are going to be profitable, so the easiest way to find them is by testing a bunch out. I’m not saying spend less time on every offer, certainly take 1 offer at a time and put forth your greatest effort into it; but don’t keep believing you can make it work when the results and data clearly show you that you can’t.

Alright, this was my first lengthy “help” article I guess you could say in a while. Life has been nuts and I’ll give you all some updates on that soon, I just didn’t want to post that and have everybody complain about “no content is posted here any more you suck” blah blah. Tell me what to write about and I’ll write about it.

Night.

For any of you that remember the good ol’ Google Trends. Google has released a sort of “Trends 2.0″ Called Google Insights. If you are doing any kind of Pay per click marketing and you localize your campaigns you will find this tool to be amazing.

Google Insights Review

The neatest feature of Google insights is the ability to break down search trends by municipalities. A search for “mortgage” in the last 12 month in Canadian region gives the following chart:

Search volume looks more or less steady throughout the entire year, with a sharp decline in August. It also give information which regions in Canada were leaders in search for “mortgage”

We can do exact search but for Ontario only:

The graph looks almost exactly as the previous one, but look at that:

Google Search Insights gives data not only for cities, but for city municipalities. I would automatically assume that Toronto would have the highest search volume, but Google broke it down to more chunks with Scarborough (part of Toronto) as a leader.

Another neat feature is the “Rising Searches”. Those are the searches that experienced significant spike during selected time period (30 days, 90 days, year, 2 years, etc)

In Ontario “true north mortgage”, “canadian tire mortgage” and “rbc mortgage” experienced growth.

Google Insights lets marketers see growth in the last 30 days, which is a more precise way of spotting rising trends.

You can run analysis on any keyword of your choice (assuming it meets Google Insights minimum threshold). There are also industries to select such as Arts, Finance, Food, Beauty, etc, with many sub-sections.

Another neat feature is the .CVS download. Once finished with analysis – impornt interesting data as a spreadsheet.