Rabs To Riches

Morality and Ethics in Affiliate Marketing

photo credit: BigMcGuire

A couple months ago I was still in a dilemma on this issue and thus postponed posting. It all started when I actually decided to promote a product a colon cleanse product based on its high payout. I actually went and developed an optin page (we’ll talk about my random, pointless action approaches at a later point in time) and then as I was searching thru Google and trying to scope out my competition, I realized that a lot of people who had used it were having not having the most pleasant experience with the product. On top of that, they had next to no luck contacting Customer Service for the company.

I stopped promoting (or my journey to future promoting ) right away. I just couldn’t promote something I didn’t believe in. Now, do you have to have tested and tried everything you becoming an affiliate for? Ofcourse not - especially in the case of physical products that are backed by . But I think especially for ingestible items you have a greater responsibility. There are health factors involved. Even in the case of information products that promise something - they should deliver on that. So at least an affiliate should do a search for user experiences, if they can’t formally review the product themselves.

So in between the traveling, the flu, and the catching up that I’ve been doing, I’ve reached some clarity on where I stand in terms of morality and ethics in this industry:

1. I will not promote something that I don’t think lives up to its claims. This is easier to do with information products since they are easier to review, but even with health related items you can usually do searches and see what the general user experience is. Anything it could have some bad reviews, but if something is predominantly regarded as unsatisfactory, then I wouldn’t promote it.

2. I will not pollute the web with useless content spinned gobbledygook pages. I recently saw an example of this, and even though it was absolutely hilarious, it is just polluting the web.

3. I won’t use blackhat techniques. I guess I’m just a wuss when it comes to this - I am too scared to use them. Even though they may not technically be ‘harming’ anyone, I do believe its wrong because its gaming the system.

Those are the basics of what I’ve come up with and just having this settled in my own mind helps me go forward . Following this mini code of ethics will allow me to at least sleep better at night and prevent any nagging feelings of the conscience.

Hiatus

Soon after my last post a couple months, we started preparing for a visit abroad to visit family and things took quite a down turn in terms of being able to keep up with work.  All that means is that I have about double the workload than normal and I really have to get moving.

Our trip was quite interesting.  We were in Pakistan and the Benazir assassination happened towards the end of our trip.   Between that and travelling to 4 different cities in a span of 3 weeks, along with sick kids made it quite impossible to think of anything work-related. Returned about a month ago but everyone has taken turns dealing with the flu and we’re just about recovered.  Such are the joys of being a work at home mom.

Anyway, I haven’t posted, but I was able to follow a lot of the big launches and have been trying to at least continue my “studying” aspect if not the “doing” aspect so actively.   I’ll be catching up the blog with some of my notes and the reviews of the past year.

So yeah, I’m back

Money for Time VS. Money for Results

Last week, I started heading over to the library so I could complete my work without distractions.  What I realized was that some tasks are time-consuming (and it wasn’t just my distractions).  One day last week, I ended up spending about 6 hours straight trying to finish up a product, and left quite frustrated when I wasn’t as done as I thought I’d be.

Then, I started thinking about my days working in the financial industry.  I couldn’t wait till 5 and I came home relatively satisfied about putting in my hours (even though it is quite unheard of anyone in the financial industry to leave at 5 - I was just a slacker, I guess). I would ofcourse want things to get done, but my self satisfaction was measured by the time put in, not necessarily the task.  For example, I knew that Project A was taking up X amount of hours per day, and it would be done when it would be done.

Now, working for myself, trying to ‘make it’ online, trying to start different revenue streams and create products, putting in any number of hours a day just does not seem to satisfy me.  Even worse, sometimes it makes me even more frustrated - “I put in all day today and I’m still not done”.

I was just reflecting on this and of course the difference is that at my J-O-B, I was getting paid no matter what.  I was getting paid to be there.  Of course my salary and job security would be reflected by my performance, but all in all, I was getting paid to be there.  As an entrepreneur, you don’t get paid for the hours, you get paid for the results.  The cut is much more fruitful in the end, but for a lazy person, it might seem like too much of an effort without any guarantee (I guess the lazy part of me might feel like that sometimes).  However, I see it as a challenge for myself - to push myself, to motivate myself to deliver.

‘Cuz that’s the only way I’m getting paid.

Flunking with Facebook Flyers (and Ads)

Since I have an actual goal for November, along with the long term projects I’m working on, I figured I should try to concurrently work on things that will possibly help me reach my goal in the short term as well. I got a WSO on Facebook Flyers last week and I thought I’d try my hands on it this past weekend.

I guess I got on this bandwagon kind of late and Facebook had already put fairly strict measures on affiliate links (etc) and squeeze pages. That was basically what I would have been trying to do for the short term. I put out about 3 ads and all of them got disabled pretty quickly.

Most of what I’ve read from the other forums and feedback from other blogs seems to indicate the same thing. The ads that are showing have really bad CTRs. I think it might be that the Facebook crowd is not there to respond to ads. I mean, I joined Facebook because all my friends were on there - to connect with them, write on walls, etc. I feel the majority of the Facebook crowd is such.

Anyway, it cost me Friday night, but at least I tried it. So I don’t feel too bad. But yeah, the WSO was pretty bad considering that this guy charged $57 for it (yeah I know I’m a total sucker).  However, he did make me aware of the opportunity, and I’m horrible with refunds, so live and learn.

Anyway, off to continue on to longer term opportunities and use what I know to reach my short term goal as well.

Maybe Affiliate Elite is Too Elite For Me

Yeah, maybe I just don’t get it.

Here’s a comment I made on Lost Ball in High Weeds :

I have to admit I didn’t see all the videos - didn’t have the time. But from my understanding, the software does two things:

1) Find out what affiliates are promoting a product

At least for clickbank, you can really just search for the hoplink in google and you’ll come up with a whole list of people promoting the product. For example for Fat loss 4 Idiots, just search for 4idiots.hop.clickbank.net. It comes up with ~20 K affiliates promoting it.

2) Find out what keywords affiliates using PPC are using

For those who really want to do this, AdSpy Pro does this for much cheaper and without the monthly fee.

I’m sure Affiliate Elite puts this information together somehow but I don’t see how it could be justified by the price + the monthly fee.

NMOC Blues (a.k.a Picking a Bad Affiliate Program)

One thing that I’ve learned is that it takes just as much research and time to promote a product with $7 commission as it does to promote a product with a $100 commission. Of course, I learned it the hard way.

Back in April, I bought Niche Marketing On Crack, and I thought it was a pretty well laid out plan and got to work right away. However, instead of doing proper research (that I knew how to do and had done for so many other products), I went into Commission Junction and picked one of the newest programs added - Bob Greene’s Best Life Diet membership.

Bad Move 1: People might disagree with me but at least on sites like ShareASale and CJ, I would NOT recommend people to join brand new affiliate programs. A lot of these companies are just testing the waters. However, because Bob Greene was a big name and backed by Oprah I thought I was relatively safe and didn’t think about the ‘new’ factor too much. It was also paying $18 commission per sale after the 10-day free trial.

Bad Move 2: The competition was just horrific. On top of that, “Best” is a stop word, which means that it’s too common of a word and some search engines don’t ‘record’ it in order to speed up searches. Do not just pick affiliate programs on a whim - just do the research.

I did actually go on to make a couple sales from the site so I know the NMOC formula works. I also got a few additions to my autoresponder. It’ s just it was a horrible thing to begin with. I thought of it like my guinea pig site and spent some time doing different things with it. Looking back, I think I spent way too much time on it.

Anyway, one day I’m looking at my Analytics account and see that the site has gotten a decent amount of traffic and I see people clicked thru to the affiliate link, but for some reason I am not seeing any clicks on CJ. I went to my site and clicked thru to the link to test it.

Turns out they close the affiliate program WITHOUT notifying any of the affiliates! How unprofessional! I was pretty depressed since I had spent quite some time on developing the site. A couple weeks later I saw that this particular program was being managed by another company who were managing other diet memberships. But now they were only paying $12. I went ahead and changed the links because some $ is better than no $.

Recently while just tracking my sales, I went and saw that they had now changed the payout to $7 - once again without any notification, but at least the links were still active. Anyway, this whole thing left such a bad taste in my mouth. You’d think that such a big name program would at least have the decency to notify their affiliates when closing the program.

Anyway lessons learned:

1. Spend time promoting big payout affiliate programs
2. Really really do good research about the market demand and competition
3. Don’t spend forever on something. Crunching out this NMOC site should not have taken me this long. Be efficient and don’t be a perfectionist
4. Don’t promote memberships who are not paying you recurring income.

Goals for November

We’re already done with 1/6th of the month but I’ve decided to put in my writing my goal for the month. I have a ton of unfinished products and techniques on my plate and in some way I don’t even know how I’m going to complete them all concurrently (it’s definitely not recommended).  But I get bored with one topic and find it refreshing to move on to another task so this mild Adult ADD might actually work in my favor.  Anyway, so my goal is to generate $1000 in profit revenue this month.  Given that my sales haven’t been exactly reliable, I won’t be over ambitious and say profit.

Another goal is to regularly post to this blog and make it a useful resource for others in the same stage of their IM career that I’m in.

All Sorts of Overloads

It’s been a while since I’ve written an update.  Mostly because the couple months were busy with both back to school and getting the hang of it, and then Ramadan.  And ofcourse, partly due to procrastination and task overload - because I’m sure I could have meant to write for 5 minutes - after all, I did have it in my planner - up to the topic even.  Anyway, I have a lot of stuff I learned during my Internet Marketing Journey that I want to share, so I hope to be writing more frequently.

We always hear about information overload, and how it leads us into this paralysis of not being able to digest anything and results in the worst possible thing of all - IN-ACTION.  Taking action and flopping is much better than not taking action at all.  This is one thing that I have to start getting myself / pushing myself to do.  Just do it.

I definitely suffer from information overload - I don’t have enough hours in the day to digest and take action on everything that I want to.  That’s why I’ve just started to focus on organization and planning.  Following thru.  Taking things one step at a time.  These are such basic concepts and these are the ones that bear the fruits of success.  I think if we can get some good habits down, some good successful habits, then success will follow.  Being organized automatically leads to a desire to be more efficient and when you start accomplishing things, you start seeing success.

But I think I suffer from something else too - let’s call it ‘task’ overload.  I have so many things to do that sometimes I get overwhelmed and just don’t feel like doing any of them.  The thought of the enormity of the thoughts (which is most often exaggerated in my own heads) makes me want to procrastinate and doing something irrelevant.  This of course leaves me in a worse situation than I started off with.  I think the lessons are the same — just do it.  Think of the tasks as smaller steps and just do them.  I have some tasks on my list that would literally take 5 minutes if I just did them, but for some reason they are there, being passed from day to day — not getting done.  Why? There is no need.  Make that to do list and ATTACK.  That is my plan of action.

Quality Content

This is such a vital issue in Internet Marketing. What qualifies as quality content? Can a few paragraphs with an affiliate link thrown in the middle pass as good quality content? There are no hard and fast rules, but I believe there are degrees of content quality. Spam is the absolute worst, and those newsletters that you can’t wait to devour are at the top of the list, and then there’s some stuff in between. Sometimes new internet marketers tend to fall in this in-between category.

I think the problem lies in trying too hard. We are trying so hard to write a good article, or to write a pre-sell, or to prevent a sales pitch from sounding like a sales pitch, or to stuff keywords in our articles to make them relevant, that we truly lose the essence of own voice in writing. This creates a horribly written end piece that does not appeal to the user. And because of that, you lose. You lose the reader. You lose the potential sale. You lose credibility.

Now, if you just stopped trying really hard and forcing the writing, and instead, took a deep breath, and started ’speaing’ in your own voice, you’ll see a completely different piece develop. Most of all, write with the audience in mind. Write with respect for the audience in mind. I’m reading Robert McKee’s Story, and he mentions this point in his introduction, and it really hit home. Think about how your readers will feel when they read what you have written. Ed Dale has re-iterated this point over and over again in the 30 Day Challenge - Simple put, when the reader comes to your page, do they get happy or do they get sad?

Yes, its just as basic as that. Respect your audience, give them quality content, and make them happy :).

The Ping List

When blogging, you need to notify the search engines that you’ve updated your blog, and here comes the value of the ping list. This list allows you to notify the engines themselves rather than wait for them to come along to your site. Since most of my websites are now wordpress based, pinging comes extremely handy.

I originally got my ping list from Brandon’s SEO blog at SEOFeed.com, but since then have looked at additional resources, and added some of my own to the mix. Here is my current ping list:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc/
http://coreblog.org/ping
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://mod-pubsub.org/knapps/blogchatt
http://ping.amagle.com
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogoole.com/ping
http://www.blogoon.net/ping
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogroots.com/tbpopuli.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/knapps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.newsgator.com/