Some random thoughts been going through my mind lately I have been meaning to put down somewhere. Here seems like a good place. Here is some of the things I seem to be saying a lot in emails to people who are asking advice.
Surround Yourself With Other Successful Marketers – You know what they say about success breeding ? Its very true. Surrounding yourself (even if its in instant messanger) with successful people is probably the single biggest step in the right direction of achieving success with internet marketing.
Understand Branding – This is huge. Its so important to understand the value of branding. Branding should be one of your biggest concerns. There is a reason most successful online companies have very unique names digg, eBay, Google, Yahoo, etc the list goes on and on. Be original in your brand. Playing off of other peoples brands is lose/lose situation because most of the time they will try to shut you down for infringment or if they dont and you become successful then people will always have brand confusion and you will just drive more people to there site over the long haul. Now with landing pages of course it might make sense to play off of a companys name to look more legitimate/respectable. Anyway understanding branding is super important.
Holidays/Events – Wow last Valentines day was huge for us pushing e-greeting cards and other misc Valetines day driven affiliate offers. Always, always prepare for holidays and events. We are starting to see some good search volume now for Tax terms and I suspect this will be pretty big aswell.
Awareness of Memes and Current Events – Depending what market you are in you will always want to keep track of what is hot in the news. For Tech niches techmeme, techcrunch, and problogger are your best bets. If celebrity gossip is your gig then I highly recommend perezhilton and thesuperficial. For general news Google and Yahoo news are teh winners.
Analytics – The key to any successful affiliate marketer is analytics. Any idiot can tell that if you spend 2$ to make 8$ that is the win. Putting the analytics in place to give you those statistics is what seperates many successful and unsuccessful online marketers.
American Express Blue Card – If you do not have the amex blue card that gives 1% cash back and you are doing search engine marketing then you are paying 1% more for your keywords then the rest of us are.
Embrace Adversity and Failure – A lot of times Success can be CRIPPLING to people. You get lazy or comfortable. Many times Adversity can really be your best friend in hindsite. Failure is unfortunatly necessary evil on the way to success. You should expect to experience failure and while it can be frustrating aslong as you learn from the experience you can usually turn it into a positive event.
Do not Fear Change – If you feel you need to mak a change then make it and watch what happens. This sounds so simple but I get emails everyday where people ask me what I think they should make a change on there site. I always ask them… why dont you do it and see what happens. I mean seriously whats the worse that happens… you go revert back?
Pay your taxes – Dont spend hours or days tying to save a few bucks when you could be using those resources to focus on growing your business.
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