StealthMoonlighter: The Online Marketer

Finally! Part 2 is here. More answers to the question “Are YOU the Next Great Affiliate Marketer?”

Well, this is just an “excerpt”, but it’s full of tips and tricks about what I know about affiliate marketing so far. You also get a good dose of what I try to pass off as sarcastic humor, but other people try to call it “wisdom.” I turned the full article into a Squidoo lens. Then I sliced and diced it up to create an article for HubPages. I’m doing this so that I can practice what I preach: the Cult of Nichenomics.

OK, so Nichenomics is not a full fledged “cult” yet, but it has potential.

Now, if you’re itching to follow something worthwhile and you’re not afraid of being “social” about it, I’ve been trying out a new membership site: Social Power Linking. It’s run by Jack Humphrey of the Friday Traffic Report and a cast of other very helpful folks. Social Power Linking is the only membership site I’ve had association with so far that’s truly over delivered. And I mean “over delivered” in a big way. If you want to see the whole Magilla, just pay them a visit.

I feel that some explaining is in order, since this “new” thing goes totally against my admonition to you in my Part 2 on Affiliate Marketing. It all comes down to having the prerogative of changing your mind when something does not work as you want it to.

To date, membership at SPL makes my 4th membership attempt this year. It’s not that I insist on being “over delivered” to. It’s that I don’t like paying a hefty monthly fee and getting a “basic” business in a box that I have to spend more time and money on in order to make it professional. In other words, if you’re eying my BlogLog and about to click on NicheRockets, just be sure you have time to spruce up whatever they send you each month before you slap it onto a domain. I only recommend them if you really, REALLY need content just to get something going and you’re open to accepting just about any “niche business of the month”.

OK, so Part 2 of “Affiliate Marketing — Are You the Next Great One?” is ready. Feel free to let me know what you think. And do pass it on if you think it will help someone else!

Just in case you’re wondering, Phase I happened during the full month of October 2007. Phase II and Phase III will each happen over the span of a week (meaning 7 days for each phase). In this, the second “Phase” we’ll will be suing what is taught in Colin Klinkert’s ebook entitled $5,000+ Per Month in Less Than 5 Months.

… which explains where I got the theme name for this blog, right?

Anyway, once you get Colin’s ebook (which I highly suggest you do as soon as possible) you’ll see that putting it to work will add an Article Marketing Foundation to the Nichenomic strategies already put in place during Phase I.

I’ll be using Colin’s “Business Plan Part A:Time Management” (found on about the 5^th page of his ebook) which outlines a week’s worth of work, Sunday to Saturday. Of course it’s up to you which day you start. In my case I’ll be doing the Thursday through Wednesday thing since my at-home work week begins on Thursday (as I’ll explain in my Profile).

Here’s the gist of “Business Plan Part A:Time Management”. Each daily task should take only 2 – 3 hours to complete.

Day 1. Decide on 3 niches

Find 10 key phrases (longtails) for each niche

Day 2. Write 5 articles on Niche #1 and submit them, post them, social post them, etc.

Day 3. Write 5 more articles in Niche #1, submit them, social post them, etc.

Day 4. Write 5 articles on Niche #2 and submit them, post them, social post them, etc.

Day 5. Write 5 more articles in Niche #2, submit them, social post them, etc.

Day 6. Write 5 articles on Niche #3 and submit them, post them, social post them, etc.

Day 7. Write 5 more articles in Niche #3, submit them, social post them, etc.

Simple, yes? Easy? NO! If it were easy everyone would be doing this and making a killing as online marketers. Do what others are too lazy or too stupid or too superior to do and you will bring home the bacon every time.

OK, so there’s obviously more to $5,000+ Per Month in Less Than 5 Month than just this time management plan. Colin also gets into selecting niches and affiliate products, creating an effective resource box for your articles, setting up your website (yes, if you’re going to go “Pro” you WILL need your own website) and article submissions.

I recommend you get this ebook now to actively follow along with Phase II.

Time to get crackin’. By that I mean

• selecting 3 niches

• tracking down keywords / longtail phrases

• writing and posting articles

• tagging blog entries and social bookmarking

• on this blog, posting progress reports (Got that? So please leave your comments!)

First let me say that I will gladly tell you what I am doing to make money online and the resources I am using that support my marketing decisions. I will also let you in on ballpark estimates of my results and encourage you to make comments and share your own ballpark estimate results – no charts, graphs, and numbers. Let’s keep it all general yet based upon actual results.

Now, a few posts ago I let you in on the two niches I was targeting. In the spirit of competition, however, I will no longer be divulging my actual niche markets. It’s nothing personal! It’s just that, as a member of Dan Raine’s Immediate Edge, I’ve seen the ugliness that can happen when people get lazy and don’t think for themselves. They “follow along” by setting up their own site using all the key phrases published for the “Example” project and end up competing with the very teachers who are trying to show the membership how to dominate a niche.

What makes this so maddening? Remember I told you I was a musician, right? Well, if you’ve ever been in a room full of people who “think” they know how to sing (a church service, for example) you know how harsh it can be when you hear Uncle Ernie trying to follow along with “Jesu, Son of Man’s Desiring”. Unless he learned the song ahead of time, he just adds to the collective train wreck. The choral selection ends up sounding like one 4 -5 minute long mumbled jumble of microtones and generally bad notes. The organist plays as fast as she can just so she can mercifully put an end to torture! The Inquisition was less brutal than this.

What I’m trying to say is that when everyone hops onto a single niche and “follows along”, the page rankings get skewed. Better to work in your own niche on your own time and check in (like in AA meetings) to let everyone know how your week has gone.

But…. if you simply can’t stand the suspense of not knowing what my niches are, and if you’re serious about getting traffic and pulling sales from your own web properties, join up at Taggzilla.com where you can be part of a social network. You’ll get to see what other folks (including me) are working on while soliciting rankings (Digg, del.icio.us, and more) from fellow (and in most cases, non-competing) marketers.

True confession time is over… now it definitely IS time to get to work.

It’s going to be a busy day getting set up to sing at the club tonight (Jack’s Hideaway, Market Street Tavern in Galveston, TX). I’ve got to meet up with my accompanist pal and get some new jazz standards into our repertoire for a major gig on November 10^th (Saturday, 8PM to Midnight at Selena’s Blue Room, also in Galveston, TX). More and more I’m wishing I had more time for music and affiliate marketing. That would of course mean ditching my part-time day job. So here’s how I’m going to do it – and how YOU can be an accomplice. Perhaps even quit your own day job by building a lucrative career as an affiliate marketer.

Two Projects In Need of Follow-Through

To re-evaluate last month’s two projects, I realize that I went overboard on some of the work while totally ignoring the most important parts of the Nichenomics methodology. I created two HubPage articles and two Squidoo lenses per niche instead of the required one. Yippee!!!

The problem was that I did not do the most important things necessary to complete the strategy: social posting and securing back links. Consequently, I got practically no traffic and made no sales. I won’t even imagine what my page rank looks like!

In doing this re-evaluation I see only one clear, sensible “next step”: Get Back On Track. I’ll look at the first month as Phase I of the project. I’m giving myself the three month’s at the end of 2007 to establish a monthly income of $5,000, remember? Just because I made absolutely no money in the first 30 days does not mean I can’t come up from behind and make a good showing in affiliate sales.

And just how do I plan to become the “Comeback Kid”? Well, I’ve been doing more research on getting back links and now have a better understanding of why I need them and how to get them. My initial reaction was to worry that it would take all day long going from forum to blog to social networking site name-dropping my blogs while being a conscientious citizen of the online community. But then I found a book by Yaro Starak called the Blog Profits Blueprint. The book is available for free, by the way. So go grab it now, and go for getting the additional .mp3 reading of the book. It’ll make following along with the illustrations a lot easier.

Anyway, Yaro outlines how to go about gathering up back links. Actually, the way he explains it, you’d be silly not to think you could grab 10 back links a day consistently. You’d be considered disorganized and lazy if you did not take action to do this daily task to keep your blog and your affiliate income alive.

Shaming time is over. Now, let’s get to work!

Bummer big time! This month (October 2007) has been a monetary failure for me as an affiliate marketer.

How sad it is. I let “life” get in the way and did not successfully complete my self-appointed mission of earning $1500 in 30 days. In fact, I did not even bring in one red cent in affiliate commission. What’s more, I did not keep an eye on this blog, my HubPages and Squidoo pages and my other projects. I’ve neglected my readers and, at this writing, am anxious about logging in to find that people may have actually been trying to follow along with me and left comments.

So what is this “life” that got in the way, you wonder? It’s called “over commitment”. Or perhaps it’s called misplaced priorities… Or boredom that comes with seeing slow (i.e., non-existent) internet marketing action? Whatever it is, my day job, my work as a part-time web developer (on sites other than my own), and my work as a performing and writing musician got in the way this month.

Sure, the bad part is that I did not meet my monetary goal. But… there IS a benefit within all the disappointment and frustration of the previous 31 days. You see, I stumbled upon some extremely useful information that makes me excited about the prospects for November 2007. I will let you in on these incredibly common-sensible strategies and tactics over the next several posts.

And, yes. This time my commitment to post something — ANYTHING — once every 24 hour period will have to be met if I expect to keep up my street cred with you, right?

Best of all, I spent only a little over $100 (USD) gaining access to some “old school of thought bustin’” information. No, I haven’t had time to implement it yet — that’s what November 2007 is for! And no, I will not be abandoning things that are already in place. Those things are the best possible launching pads for the next bit of business that’s about to begin.

Bet you can’t tell I’m excited about what I plan to be revealing to you on this blog over the next 60 days. OK, so it’ll be smack dab in the middle of the Holiday Season. And it’s probably bad mojo to tell you ALL my secrets. But, realistically I cannot tell you absolutely everything that I plan to do — or that I actually do — over the next 31 days. Not all of it will be relevant, and there will be some that won’t have relevance that is intuitively obvious until something actually comes of it.

Bottom line: stay tuned. And please leave comments so I (and everyone else reading this blog) can see how your life as an Internet Marketer is going.