Affiliate Summit - Get Motivated

Hi Gang,

They did have a motivational speaker and I though would add his notes.
Individual Success:

• Get over yourself - Don't be so self centered
• Avoid Self Sabotage
• Always Move Forward
• Fail your way to success
• Doubt kills success - A good Success website - Chris Brogan
  
• Just do it
• Get productive or perish
• Distractions kill
• Tips on removing distractions
• Shut down time - No phones, No Twitter
• Reward yourself when you get accomplish task - nice lunch
• Go to the library for quite
• Be remarkable
• Misplace jealousy
• Tell the Truth
• No overnight success
• What have you done?
• Hang around successful people
• What is your signature product
• Doers get what they want and everyone else gets what they get
• Are you a loser or a failure? Loser is bad , Failure is Good = means you are willing to fail and try
• Fail Hard, Fail First, and Move on
• Negativity Kills - Remove negative people across the board from your life

Then he started to talk about the web and being successful there.
Web Success:

• Why people go online:
• Solve Something
• Get Entertained
• Your job is take about the consumers "Pain"
• Simple wins always on the web - Look at Google
• Easy site
• Problem Solve 
• Branding
• Do you sell what you think you sell? A product or Feeling - Swim with dolphins or do I sell adventure or happiness or smiling
• Website to help your business be more efficient - 37 Signals  
• No one reads anymore, everyone scans a website.
• A good book to read " Don't make me think - Steve Krug "
• What are your customers thinking
• Your customers have short attention span
• How does your website stand out
• People want bargains
• Are you giving some sort of discount?
• He showed a company called CrossFitCleveland.com and they are a fitness company and they promote by all these means.
• Email Marketing - Constant Contact
• Meet Up 
• Flickr
• Facebook
• Plugged In Cleveland
• You Tube
• My Space
• Crossfit
• Linkedin
• Twitter

Its always great to get motivated because I needed this talk because I spent a lot of time in prayer the days before whether I can make any money doing this affiliate stuff. But I feel God gave me peace and I ready to start again. This talk confirmed it.
God Bless,
John
Ready to Swim with the Dolphins in Miami

Affiliate Summit - Website Reviews

Hey Gang,

I went to a few classes on Website review. It was a lot information and I am sure of all the lingo, but here the notes in this area. Maybe it will help you. They had a panel of speaker and they dissected many websites in front of the audience. Here are the points I was able to get from these sessions.

• Too much CSS code
• 404 code need to be the correct error redirect
• Loading too long - should load on regular DSL 30 seconds or less
• Use Yahoo Site Explorer to check accurate back links << Cool tool
• Use Google Webmaster tools. You can check speed load time here
• the use of No Follow tags on your site. They talked about this a lot. I really don't totally understand. I know you put this code around links that you don't want google to follow. I am not totally sure what links you would not want google to follow. Also, I don't know what this code looks like. Does anyone?
• They talked about 301 redirects and doing this correctly
• Be carefull not to have to many out bound links on a page. Using "No follow" tags
  
• Be careful about your webmaster, if you have one, imbedding outbound links without your knowledge
• Recommended to use Click Path to see which Key Words are converting
• Meta Descriptions are #1 things to keep up with
• To find all your pages that are being index on google >> Site:Your URL
• Talked about whether you need to put your price on your site or not. A / B test results
• Recommended to use SEOMOZ for Seo Tool. It has FREE and Paid Tools
• Use Fire Fox Web Developer Tool bar plug ins - No sure which one
• Make sure that you are using your tags correctly

I hope this make sense to you.
God Bless
John
Looking for great Florida Vacation

Affiliate Summit - Day 1 Mentor Class

Hi All,

Shakira and I are in Las Vegas at the affiliate summit. We are learning a lot and I am going to post the notes as they come in.

Mentor Program
During the this session, we had a change to talk to member that officially called mentors that can help newer affiliates.

I focused toward two people who I thought could help me.

One women focused on the social side and I going to make notes about my discussion with her.
* With Facebook, you need to create a business fan page.
* Once you create the fan page, you can find a Badge code from Facebook where you get code to put on other sites to get people to sign up as a fan.
* The key to make Facebook and Twitter you need to automate where you can.
* When you blog post, the RSS get posted on Facebook automatically.
* Twitter - socialoomph.com This helps you schedule your tweets automatically
* twitterfeed.com  Where your blog post goes automatically
* Tweetdeck.com TweetDeck is your personal browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook and more. This will show you tweets and group in the right tweets grouping.
* When sending a tweet message, @name this message goes to the person tweet account and is public. d before the tweet name is direct. # name is before staying within the same group.
* TubeMogul is a free service that provides a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed. TubeMogul tracks rich, standardized analytics far beyond "views," including per-second audience dropoff, audience geography and much more.


Well we are off to the Share-A-sale under the star party. Will have more post soon.
God Bless,
John

Start of 2010 Meeting Notes

Hi All,

Well, here we are and ready for a great new year. Tonight we discussed a few things.

1. Rich was explaining about his websites and how he building his business through network marketing companies vs. affiliate companies. He explained to me why he likes the networking side of his business.

Here are two examples of network marketing site he has:
http://www.fishoildirect.com/
http://usapetstoday.com/

• The big thing is that he is in control of his customers.
• He gets to see his order. 
• He gets to see which product the customer order. 
• He makes residual income from all his customers.
• Commission can be really high, especially on the first sale.
  

What you get with Affiliate companies.

• You do get to sell products you want to sell, your hobby or passion.
• You do get a 60 day cookie on the customer computer if they do buy again from that company.

I am going to the affiliate summit in Las Vegas next week with Shakira. Shakira is getting introduced to the affiliate buinsess and we are going to see if we get blessed with some great ideas and companies to work with. Lets see if Shakira gets excited about the business too.

Rich and I talked about a game plan when I go to the conference.

• I need to find companies that are willing to send to me a customer receipts to I can see my sales.
• I need to find a company that is willing to share with me what there top affiliate websites are doing, blogging, website set up.
• I need to find a company that is willing to share with me what are the top 10 products are selling through affiliates.

Lastly, we viewed a video from Allen Victor, one of our internet mastermind member, has done a great FLASH commercial for his natural soap buinsess. Check it out. Here are a couple of notes that Allen told me. He used a voice over service, Voicetalentnow.com. The voice service did a great job and it was reasonably priced. The only challenge with the voice over, they only give you so much time so that changed the amount of time he made the video. I still think it came out great. Check it out.



We have decided for the next Skype meeting, January 21, we are going to do a Video Skype meeting. So I need to get a video cam. If you plan to join us, please get a video cam.

God Bless and see you guys soon.
John
Swimming with the Dolphin Tortola

Meeting Notes

Hi Guys,
We had a strong turn out for the last meeting for 2010.
John Neyrot
Alex
Rich
John Mac

We talked a lot about face book and the uses.

We talked about Google Wave and the uses of it. We all agreed this would be very useful oneday.

Alex had some good suggestions about using MeetUp.com >> Search local groups of similar interest.

One step for communicating to all social sites with Ping.FM

Alex talked about his mentor, Jase Sanders and his facebook postings.
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to you all !!!
See you in 2010.
God Bless,
John

Speaking with Carolyn Tang from ShareASale

Shakira and I are going to the Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas in Mid January 2010. Today I spoke with Carolyn Tang of Share A Sale to get a better feel of the market and understanding the their affiliate network.

We talked about the basics and she gave me some great ideas.

DataFeeds which is where you download all the products in one big Excel spreadsheet.
Webmerge is a software to merge CSV iles or Database files into a Html template. There is a free trial and then it cost $99

Carolyn recommended using this....
Using Afftrack with ShareASale
You can use the afftrack= portion of your link code to include affiliate defined tracking strings. Enter your tracking variable immediately after the afftrack= portion of your link code. This tracking variable will be echoed back to you in the Activity Details Report (http://www.shareasale.com/a-accountactivity.cfm). The tracking string must be alphanumeric, and can not contain any spaces or special characters. There is a 255 character limit. If you are using the "Shortest Code Available", Email Links or Product Links, you may need to add the afftrack= wording to your link code. A sample link would look like this:
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=70&U=XXXX&M=47
Where the XXXX is replaced with your Affiliate ID number.
You can add the afftrack= parameter to this code along with your tracking string. The tracking string must be alphanumeric, and can not contain any spaces or special characters. If your tracking string is "123ABC", then your new link would look like this:
http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=70&U=XXXX&M=47&afftrack=123ABC
The afftrack= parameter may already be in your link - be sure to use the existing one and not to add an additional one.

For the Affiliate Summit, she recommended that I bring...

*Color copies of my website and to show merchants.

*Bring Plenty of business cards.

*Go to the Sharaasale party on Sunday to make contact.

Going to the Affiliate Summit and sign up for the Mentor program..

Carolyn recommended that I look into the RIU Affiliate program


Thank you for your time today, Carolyn!!!
God Bless,
John
Swim with the Dolphins in Tortola

Google Wave

Hi All,

Google Wave is coming. You should watch this youtube video to get an outline of what is going to happen.

If you want to sign up for Wave, go here

Watch Video


Also, if you want to buy a manual to understand and use better  click here

I am not sure how we can use the wave but maybe a way to carry on the meeting virtually this way.
God Bless,
John