So Some Smart Person Said...

If you ever watched a Charlie Brown cartoon, you may remember how the adults sound. 'Ywa Ywa Ywa Ywa' Unintelligible and impossible to translate into kid text. That's what a lot of affiliate marketing advice has sounded like to my ears. It's been difficult to resist falling back to the Smile and Nod mode, trying to act like I have a clue what they're talking about.

I'm a trusting soul. Sometimes too trusting for my own good. So I have to be extra wary at times, to make sure that I don't let every con artist take my shirt. A girl only has so many shirts to go around, after all.

But yet another pattern has emerged. I am seeing an indelicate truth which may tick off a few people who are trying to prey on the weak via email solicitations.

If I ask for advice, I get very nice responses. If someone offers me advice, I feel like they want me to give them something (like my Visa card). Now, I am sure that there are thousands of very nice people who will freely offer advice to new affiliate marketers such as myself (and yes, I'm still feeling very new at this). But I am also very sure that, for each nice person out there, there are ten waiting in the wings with snake oil in hand.

So I asked for some advice. And this very nice person said 'well, why don't you just open up your site and see how it goes, before spending money on all those trick things?'

So that's what I'm doing. The blog is in place, the store is in place, and the forum is in place. Wish me luck.

Differentiation

I am deeply indebted to Brooks Schaaf for a long IM session in which he gave me a wealth of information I desperately needed.

AMs: don't ignore resources that show up inadvertently. I am learning, from painful experience, that the gurus of this field are sometimes the most silent.

Fall Into the Danger Zone

So.. the store works well, and the navigation gremlins have been put out to pasture, and the visitors seem to like it. And yet, something is still missing (besides the obvious thing - sales).

In a way I am reminded a bit of the grand opening of the tavern that my late husband and I bought back in 1985. We worked like mad to get everything ready for the opening, slaving on the place by the midnight oil lamps, stumbling home at 3am to arise at 8 and start again before the desert heat and sand squat on us and made work impossible. Finally we flung open the doors and stood back proudly, awaiting the mad dash. It never came.

Traffic trickled in, a bit wary and a bit put off that the place had changed ownership without their permission. Little was said about our hard work, the new bar stools, the carefully repaired bathrooms, the new fixtures and signage. The old guard would eventually accept us as one of their own, but that first day was not the day.

So now I see a similar trend with Fern's General Store. I hope someday I'll find myself accepted within the neighborhood.

Changes Abound

Many changes to layout and content, including individual stores for much of the main store directory, with more to follow. Traffic has started to pick up at the Fern's General Store site, with much of it being repeat visitors. I have turned off automatic traffic generators for awhile as I attempt to get the email sign-up doodad to do what it is advertised to do.

Resolution 2: Lose Wait

Imagine my surprise to hear my site is, to put it in one user's words, slower than a sleeping slug.

The scissors came out and much extraneous weight got lost overnight. The site loads much faster now,. but something is still draaaagging us down. I'm putting it on Pilates tomorrow and will figure this out.

Advice is flying at me from all directions, mostly through my emailbox. I've fallen into a pattern of read, tweak, stitch, watch traffic for changes, rinse, repeat. Given the resounding disappointment of the holiday shopping season, I sense I have a lot of rinsing to do.

Today it was a video on long tail keywords. Wait. Let me rephrase that. Today it was a video promoting a video on long tail keywords. I sat through the first one, eagerly awaiting information. Instead of truly useful ideas, it pointed me to yet another video to find and buy... or I could save precious resources and attend their seminar in person.

I'd rather have the 45 minutes of my life back.

Tis the Season

I hope everyone's holidays were bright, calm, peaceful. My cats and I played ribbon toss for a few hours until they got bored and refused to let me play in their reindeer games, but other than that, things were nice and quiet. I enter the new year armed with a much wiser and circumspect attitude toward affiliate marketing, including the sad wisdom that enthusiasm does not equate success. So much hype, so little reality.

Note, though, that I am not giving up or giving in.

Caveat Emptor and Other Latin Warnings

So, someone asked me the other day why I chose this particular approach to affiliate marketing, as opposed to taking a safer approach - single stores, single products, single ClickBank drop-downs. I don't think there's an easy answer, to be honest, except the one that makes no sense. While a single store per affiliate would make more sense, and it might be the route I take after the first of the year, to me it doesn't seem logical.

When I shop in real life, I tend to aim for malls, for lots of choices, for the freedom to decide where I am going to spend my hard-earns. Why would I want a different approach online?

When Failure Looks a LOT Like Success

A few sleepless nights later, and the store reaches a much more usable state. It's ironic - the design is quite similar to the original approach, with the goldencan content feed at the very top of the first page, but with a great deal more polish and professionalism. It resembles the first attempt but it works.

Why?

Because my visitors are telling me so.

To Suceed You Must First Fail

A wise man once said, 'To succeed once, you must fail ten times.' Which brings me to the topic of the day, daring to fail in order to succeed. Success, such a solid yet evasive word. So relative to the state of expectations, nebulous, difficult to quantify, yet so sought.

I have found hesitancy to be my own worst enemy in much of this venture. I tend to analyze the heck out of something before taking the leap. This tends to ensure that I get very little done, and certainly don't fail as often as I otherwise would. Well, even that proclivity has its downfall. As those of you who have been reading along may know, I discovered fatal flaws and logistical nightmares with Fern's General Store - errors which I should have picked up on immediately but didn't as I was standing far too close to the tree to see the forest. Or the other way around.

To make matters worse, or better as the case may be, this is not the first failed design the store has labored under.

Failure 1 - The first attempt was ugly, top-heavy, poorly set for navigation, and was missing several critical components including search. That got tossed in favor of a store directory approach which was, in the eyes of some critics, worse by far. So I scrambled to make things less focused on the store directory and more on the store itself.

Failure 2 - A benevolent visitor clued me in, said it did not motivate her to shop, and pointed me to a site that did, the clue sunk in. I scrambled to restructure the place, ditching everything in the process and moving to a .php setup which could be more easily updated. The result was declared 'better' by quite a few folks. I rested on that laurel happily.. right up until I decided to do some shopping myself.

Failure 3 - I tried to use the site. The laurels toppled away into the abyss. It was unusable. Irredeemably difficult to navigate since there is nothing to navigate to. I scrambled to restructure the place, then stopped dead in my tracks when I looked at the data made available from the affiliate partners. Almost without exception, their product item scripts contain no prices. NO PRICES. Who shops at places and pushes Buy Now buttons without knowing what they're going to have to spend!?

Nobody sane, or very few, that's who.

So, at this time, wishing I could climb into a WayBack Machine and rewind three months worth of fruitless labor, I am once again in analysis paralysis mode, trying to figure out a way to do this right, or at least do it well, or at least not face Failure #4 of the ten I have to achieve before making it work.

... and then it hit me

There ought to be a law of the universe that declares thusly: If you build a website, you must be forced to use the website, just like a real user, a real visitor, a real non-owner, a real victim of said website, for a period of several days before said website goes live.

The whole reason for this journal of progress is to admit to my mistakes, that others may learn, nod wisely, assimilate the errors and avoid them in their own works. So I admit it, after having tried to use my own store to go shopping... I made some grave mistakes. Huge errors. Highly counter-intuitive maneuvers that make the site impossible to use, even for a licensed psychic.

At this time I am standing back from it and trying to identify just exactly what those errors are. It's difficult to reach the keyboard from that position, lemme tell you, and even more difficult to admit to the problem, much less find a rational solution. But, it's post-mortem time. Learn from it, please.

1 - Failure to think like someone who has never been to the site before. Number one error in judgment, in this case, is familiarity. I know where things are, therefore everyone else should just intuitively be able to find them. Bad mistake, and it's a lot easier to vote with feet and go find a website that isn't as difficult to navigate.

2 - Failure to make design follow function. On-the-ground shopping is not the same as web shopping. We go to a store, we find a department, we hunt through the racks, we buy, we leave. Web shopping requires a bit of a twist in the wind-up and approach. We search for what we want and find the store, we go to the site and search for the product, then we buy, then we might browse the racks if our curiosity is piqued. But browsing the racks is rarely the first thing on our minds.

3 - Finish the site before waving your arms and attracting traffic. Granted, I thought I was done before I actually tried it myself.

Here's what happened. The other night, sitting back and sipping a last cup of coffee before retiring, I thought - Gee, I should get started on my own shopping, now that I've built this nifty big store. And I want some more of these oh-so-comfortable microfiber poodle ped socks I found and got last month, now that it's getting so chilly. Surely one of these 200 stores will have them. So I searched. And I searched, and I hunted, and I poked into corners and I peered behind counters, and found.. nothing.

But as I was searching and hunting and poking and peering, I found myself getting more and more frustrated at not finding what I wanted in the requisite 2.025 seconds. There was just no way, even given the site-wide search, to do so. Why? Because the site is incredibly product-light and store-heavy. By process of elimination I was able to find the logical stores for this purchase, but only because I already knew which stores were the most likely to have the product. A visitor won't know this, and I was asking them to dig and search and poke and hunt and peer. Unfair.

So I, like so many of my erstwhile clients would, gave up, voted with my feet, went back out of the store to Google, performed the search, did not find the product in my site nor any of my stores, and ended up going back to the original source (only to find that they don't have them anymore either).

Lesson learned, the hard way, and many weeks of midnight oil and well-intentioned efforts is being ripped out today in favor of a much more product-oriented layout set up so that any visitor can find what he or she wishes without being a member of Psychic Friends Network.

Less is More, or is it just Less?

I'm beginning to fear I have made a rookie mistake - a very blatant and obvious one which I am not sure how to cure at this stage of things. I went from having one affiliate to about 200. I am swamped with emails and to-do lists to keep each of the presence conditions fresh and nifty, and have had precisely one sale, yielding a commission of $2.84.

The site looks good, I'm told. Crisp, fast, easy to use - yet something is missing (besides the obvious sales). What is it? I'd appreciate feedback.

Labored Fruits

So I thought to myself, well, gee, I can write a website. I can put together a store front and give a set of affiliates a decent showing, do the SEO, get things set up all pretty, and have it all done in time for Black Friday.

And so I did. It took about a month, but the site is together. It has gone through three major design changes, a shift from HTML to PHP, a shift from tables to CSS, a shift from store-focus to product-focus, plus my own shift from sanity to gibbering fool. Why on earth did I think this was going to be simple?

As it turns out, it wasn't nearly as difficult as it would have been without the intervention and counsel of some dear friends and sisters. Thank goodness for the honesty and guidance, or what you see now would still be three weeks ago in a bad state of uninvitingness. But as it is, I rather like it.

Day 16 - AM Haiku in Silver Dust

Visa bill arrives
Adwords titters gleefully
Tomorrow looks thin.

During my enforced absence, feet up on ottoman as ordered by doctor, I fretted at not being able to work on all things computer. Well, I could have, but I type like an otter with arthritis on my inherited laptop, which has a nasty habit of curling up and going to sleep just when I get in the mood to work.

So instead I watched TV - lots and lots of it. I do that too often anyway, or at least I did before the mania of Affiliate Marketing grabbed me and ripped my life away. This time, though, I wrote down the name of every single company that displayed a commercial, the product or service or sale they advertised, and approximately where it was in the program's timeframe.

After a few hours of that hand-cramping exercise, I compiled it all into a single list, sorted it, looked for patterns and frequencies, then headed to the affiliate centers and looked for those companies, making it a priority to apply for their affiliate or publisher programs. I haven't heard back from several of them, but those which I did hear from, I got into place in my AM pages at Fern's General Store, as high up on the page as possible.

Why not take advantage of the ad dollars they've already spent, after all...

Day 16 - The Zen of the Tuba

Since discovering myself racing around corners and colliding with myself, I'm forcing a slowdown. It got so slow, in fact, that I actually slept an entire night without having to get up and check my affiliate network state of affairs and implement 'just one more thing' on the new website. I got a few things done on the game, though not as much as I would have hoped, and made contact with a new traffic service which began showing results within the hour.

Traffic is very good to Fern's General Store. Now if I can just keep people from racing by without stopping. Wonder if those spike sticks that LAPD uses in car chases will work on the Info Superhighway...


I take stock of my progress:

So far I've spent $226.
My revenue is at $0.
I have 3 hits on a Clickbank page.
I have 20 hits on Commission Junction placements.
I have 185 views of my Too-Simple Chili Relleno Casserole recipe.
I have 76 views of my Too-Simple Time Creation recipe.
I have 79 views of my Too-Simple Teensy Toffee Treasures recipe.
I have 103 views of my Too-Simple Clutter Confrontation page.
I have 80 views of my Too-Simple Chili Verde Soup recipe.
I have 20 views of my Too-Simple Ways to De-stress Holiday Shopping article.

I'm beginning to wonder just how effective article writing has been for my presence. I'll keep trying, of course. I am not prone to giving up...

Day 15 - Impatience Kicks In

If someone offers you a one dollar bill, would you take it?
Highly likely, especially if that someone says 'hey, this fell out of your wallet.'

If someone offers you a $20 bill, would you take it?
Quite possibly, especially if that someone says 'here, I owe you this from last week's lunch with Bob.'

If someone offers you a $1000 bill, would you take it?
Perhaps but I bet you'd hesitate no matter what that someone says (and check for the proper mint markings).

If someone offers you a $10 bill, and tells you that he'll give you a $10 tomorrow and another $20 the day after that and another $50 the day after that, would you take it?
No?
Guess what. You are normal.

Distrust abounds in this business, I am finding. Cutthroat, surreptitious, conniving and guarded. Or perhaps it is that I am landing in with a Bad Crowd.

One thing that does bother me is that my Fern's Great Northern site is not showing up in any of the search engines. I'm beginning to think I am missing a major clue or hint in this puzzle, as if the faster I run, the farther away I get from my goal. The multi-gazillionaire status is eluding me nicely.

I have, however, postponed my nosedive into the morass of Adwords for another day. I know, I know.. it's not the amount of spend, it's the return on investment, the all-powerful ROI. However, when working with a budget that is closer to zero than I care to admit, I wonder if I may have bitten off more than I should be trying to chew... or perhaps I'm having a bad reaction to Daylight Savings Time kickover. That always messes me up and tapdances on my attitude.

Well, fresh start in the morning with renewed enthusiasm!

Day 14 - Redirects

All of a sudden, something makes sense. More bits of the puzzle begin to emerge and I feel a sense of clarity and direction that was previously barely there. I narrow the casting of my net, focus my sign-ups, cut back mercilessly on my previously broad band of advertisers and begin to aim at a new-found target.

Two solid days later, I have a website put together that actually looks rather nifty. The clunkiness is beginning to get kicked out, the lines are beginning to look professionally drawn, as if the HTML code can sense a drop in my hand's hesitancy.

I stand back and look - and it looks pretty durn good. Storefronts glide in and out of view at the click of a button. Product search fields search, as expected.

Yep. I can do this. I take a quick glance at my Paypal balance and wince. If I'm gonna do it, I need to stop thinking of how much I've spent and begin to think in terms of return on investment. For tomorrow, I dive headfirst into the keyword morass and Google Adwords.

Day 13 - Fear of Failure, or Success?

We humans tend to fail at ventures for a variety of reasons. Here's a few: - we fail to start - we can't find the information and support we need - we fear failure - we fear success - we don't want to look dumb - we let enthusiasm replace logic - we ignore logic when it does finally show up - we ask for advice but do not listen to it - we blame everyone else but ourselves - we give up.

Today I spent way too much time watching TV. I am not apologizing; the day was an extremely fruitful and productive one.

Normally I spend the commercial breaks on trips to the kitchen, email window, coffee retrieval.. or I fast-forward through the chunks of time with the push of a button. Today, instead of bailing on the commercialism, I studied it with pencil and paper and a pair of highlighters.

Take a wild guess what I found... I'll reveal the total analysis tomorrow, but I can tell you now that what I saw in those commercials drove me in a fresh new affiliate marketing direction.


I take stock of my progress:

So far I've spent $125.
My revenue is at $0.
I have 2 hits on a Clickbank page.
I have 7 hits on Commission Junction placements.
I have 164 views of my Too-Simple Chili Relleno Casserole recipe.
I have 55 views of my Too-Simple Time Creation recipe.
I have 54 views of my Too-Simple Teensy Toffee Treasures recipe.
I have 88 views of my Too-Simple Clutter Confrontation page.
I have 28 views of my Too-Simple Chili Verde Soup recipe.
I have 7 views of my Too-Simple Ways to De-stress Holiday Shopping article.

I have successfully not spent about $3490 on hidden secrets and ultimate authorities.
I have successfully not signed up for approximately $10,300 in seminars and gurus.

Day 12 - Affiliate Marketing Silver Linings

Without admitting to the entire world that I have no clue what I am doing, I stride boldly into another affiliation with my eyes wide and spirits high. This program is something I could rave about for the next ten hours if you let me. It Just Makes Sense.

Back in the day, I participated in several MLM and Network Marketing companies. Some didn't admit they were MLM; some crowed about it. I managed to waffle through training materials and cassette tapes (!) and brochures and training manuals and pamphlets, nodding at each step like I got a clue what it was I was supposed to be doing to get someone else to work for me. I gave it the best shot I had, given what I knew how to do. I did not have the tools available to me that you have today - especially the Internet. My main advantage was youthful enthusiasm and boundless energy.

My main disadvantage was being totally unprepared and under-instructed.

In the early 1980s, my husband and I attended an enthusiasm-building seminar that ended up with us spending about a grand for the honor of participating in a survival-foods marketing effort, cheering at the top of our lungs along with the rest of the clamoring pack. A few days later, after the wild cheering had faded and the energy of the hotel banquet hall had dimmed, the start-up package arrived. We settled down in a corner and opened it, read everything in the brochures and training guide, and tried to regenerate the wild enthusiasm we'd felt back at the Holiday Inn.

It didn't happen.

We stared at the stuff in the start-up package and scratched our heads. Now that we had it, what do we do with it?? We felt a bit silly, sort of like the dachsund that finally catches a Volkswagen. We tried cooking up one of the packages for dinner: The food was edible, had a shelf life of 999 years or so and was guaranteed to survive a nuclear holocaust. It wasn't spectacular, but it would have worked well for emergency rations. So we tried harder to regenerate the enthusiasm we'd felt. After all, we reasoned, it must be our own lack of spirit that was trying to trip us up from almost guaranteed success!

After a few days of circular pep talks and repeated answering machine messages to the upline who had signed us, we realized we had nary a clue what do to. The remains of the start-up package migrated to the back bedroom where it gathered dust for about three years. Bottom line: Once the cheering was done and the glitter of the moment wore off, we were left just as confused as before we wrote the big membership check. Why?

Why did we fail? Easy.
Because the instructions in the crate were just as clueless as we were.

Because the upline from us in this pyramidal paradox were just as clueless as we were.

Because the upline from THEM was just as clueless as he was.

Because we could not find anyone to tell us what to do next and how to do it right.

Save yourself from the trials and frustration that we went through.


I don't care how good of a communicator you have in your back pocket. If the person doesn't make sense - if his presentation doesn't make sense - you aren't going to get the help you need.

If the person doesn't reach you and grab you with a twist on the concept that makes you sit up and blink - I don't care how great a salesman he may be - you aren't going to get the help you need.

If the person doesn't take the time to express the concepts in pure and simple steps that make sense to YOU - I don't care how great of a MLM upline he may say he is - you aren't going to get the help you need.

Here is the truth: YOU can reach out and get the help you need. Nobody will just step in and offer it to you. That's a given. That's the bottom line.

Here is the offer. Here is what you need: The entirely logical approach network marketing, with a presentation that makes sense, in terms anyone can understand, with pure and simple steps that make sense.

Yeah, right, I hear you grinning. Ten thousand people can explain network marketing, MLM, downlines, etc etc until we're bored to tears and our hair falls out.

Of course there are, and that's part of the problem. And that's why there's all that confusion.

If you find someone who can explain MLM, Network Marketing, downlines, uplines, in terms that make sense, grab him.

Grab everything he writes, says, thinks, offers.
Study him, learn everything you can from him, pick his brains and plead for more.
Name your firstborn after him...
I don't care what it takes - this is the person who will help you make sense of it all.



Don't take my word for it. Do your own due diligence. Do your own investigating. Watch the videos - ignore the quality of some of the translated versions - but do not ignore the content under any circumstances. Judge this man's brilliance for yourself and you'll see why you need his clarity and logical approach in your toolbox.


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I do a quick calculation on my situation to date...

So far I've spent $97.
My revenue is at $0.
I have 2 hits on a Clickbank page
I have 164 views of my Too-Simple Chili Relleno Casserole recipe.
I have 52 views of my Too-Simple Time Creation recipe.
I have 50 views of my Too-Simple Teensy Toffee Treasures recipe.
I have 85 views of my Too-Simple Clutter Confrontation page.
I have 20 views of my Too-Simple Chili Verde Soup recipe.
I have 6 views of my Too-Simple Ways to De-stress Holiday Shopping article.

I have successfully not spent about $3490 on hidden secrets and ultimate authorities.
I have successfully not signed up for approximately $10,300 in seminars and gurus.

Day 11 - Affiliate Marketing 101

Affiliate marketing newcomer, be aware. I am discovering some basic truths regarding affiliate marketing that you may want to jot down on a Post-It and stow someplace away from your coffee mug. If you want to send me a bunch of money for this advice, feel free to do so...

1 - Free advice guaranteed.
The free is not necessarily free. The guarantee is enforceable only if you can find them again. I am not going to name names or point fingers. Caveat emptor, and do your homework ahead of time instead of having to do it later to see where you goofed up.

2 - Carefully guarded secrets aren't always.
Be extremely careful if someone tells you they are going to share a closely guarded secret of success with you (yeah... you and 6,287,491 of their closest friends). If you start getting emails from someone who claims to be your best buddy if you'll subscribe to his free email newsletter, with no obligation whatsoever, be prepared for a soon-to-arrive inundation of emails from him and all of his other affiliate programs and the unending deluge of messages carefully written to appear as if he is your new best buddy and is sitting on the edge of his chair just waiting to hear back from you.

3 - Overnight success isn't.
If something looks too good to be true, it probably isn't. Sure, the massive machine of the Internet moves at incredible speed. Sure, the opportunity looks great and you could strike it rich overnight. Sure, the person writing the copy is saying he'll send your money right back if you don't! (Note - sometimes this is legitimate - do the due diligence... look into the source of this offer. Is this a person of note in the field of affiliate marketing? Do they have a positive reputation that reinforces the trust you are itching to put forth? Google the author's name and see what you find. Before I capitulated and signed up to get Project X, yer durned right I Googled the heck out of it and found out everything I could humanly get without actually buying the package itself. As it turns out, I did find a lot, and am glad I invested in the package.

4 - Leap but slowly.
Carefully worded come-hithers which promise you instant results if only you will shell out $129.95 ( but this low price is only low for a very limited time!) creates a sense of urgency by giving the sensation that if you do not ACT NOW you may be missing out on the greatest thing since the secrets of the location of Atlantis. Don't. Take a breath. Close your wallet and think it over. Read the ad copy and get a sense of what this person has written which drew you in so well. Learn from that.

5 - Read what is sent to you, not as a consumer, but as a competitor.
Look at all the pretty hype. See how it draws you in, reading down long pages of nice graphics, nifty check marks next to benefit lists, past the subtly-background-colored testimonials, around the half-dozen Sign Up Now boxes? How does it make you feel? What does it engender in your brain's entertainment center? Do you feel soft and floaty, complacent and compliant? Does the nice font lull you into a sense of agreeable hypnosis? Are you reaching for your Visa card yet? Don't. This is exactly what you want to learn to do for your own affiliate marketing purposes.

6 - Don't skip or skimp.
Affiliate marketing has a high potential and, if you believe the majority of super-affiliate folks, anyone can do it. I must admit, after eleven days of focused activity (minus half a day discarded for sneezing and allergy meds that made me goofy, dopey, grumpy and several other dwarves), there is great and serious potential here in Affiliate Marketing Wonderland. However, if you're gonna do it, do it right. Be the turtle, not the hare. Pick the path and take the steps in sequence.

Yes, there are steps that make sense and a sequence to them that is supposely working for thousands of affiliate marketers. How do I know this if I have not made my first gabazillion bucks as an affiliate marketing specialist? Easy... I've spent a few decades in management and business ownership, and I know that every project has definable steps and sequences. The key is gain that definition, then to do them in the right order, with the right investment of time, effort and financial commitment.

I'm not going to try to second-guess what those steps are or what the sequence is. After all, I'm falling down this particular rabbit hole right along with you. All I'm doing is writing down what I'm doing as I go, and keeping track of it here, so you can read along, nod in agreement, gasp in horror, cheer in unison, or avoid a mistake I find I've made.