Transcript continued from the Episode 033 Show notes
Hanging Out with Cliff Ravenscraft
I said this week has been exciting because I finally got to meet face-to-face live in and in person, Cliff Ravenscraft. This is one of those weird things about podcasting. I’ve known Cliff for some time, but I’ve never actually laid eyes on the guy. We’ve talked on the phone, I’ve bought products from him, I’ve been in a mastermind with him, I’ve exchanged 1,000 emails with him, but we’ve never ever seen each other face-to-face. I had the same kind of experience with Pat Flynn. It’s really neat. That’s one of the things I really love about podcasting.
Cliff was in town speaking at the Catholic New Media Conference, which was actually in Arlington, Texas. It was really cool because Cliff is an expert at podcasting which is a primary new media methodology, but he also is a strong Christian man. He’s not Catholic, but he has Christian podcasts. They had him in to talk about how to effectively talk about that in new media. His talk was absolutely fantastic. It didn’t have super heavy religious content, it certainly had quite a bit but it had a lot of good practical tips.
One thing that Cliff talked about was the quality of content being one of the most important things in any kind of web adventure. Cliff is talking about podcasting specifically, but I think this is generally true even if you’re just building a website. I had my little Flip recorder with me and I was recording Cliff’s talk and I wanted to just play a little clip for you to hear what Cliff has to say about content and he uses one of my favorite clichés, content is king.
Cliff:
Content is king. I want to encourage you to create life changing can’t live without so high quality when it comes to the type of content that you are bringing that people will want to share it, that they will feel guilty for not sharing with somebody that they know who needs to hear this.
Cliff is talking about more to the podcast genre, but I think this applies equally well to a website about dishwashers. If you’re an affiliate marketer and you’re selling dishwashers I think it’s perfectly reasonable that you’d want to create content on your website that was such a high quality that people who knew that other people were trying to buy dishwashers would absolutely send them to your website. I think that’s something to think about when you’re trying to decide how you’re going to play this affiliate marketing game.
Is it possible to do the kinds of things that I’m doing at the snoring site and throw up some private label rights content and generate traffic? Well, we think so, and we’re learning about that here on this podcast. But, is that really what you want to be doing in terms of building a real solid long lasting business? I don’t know. I would say Google is trying to attack the kinds of thin affiliate websites that used to work. I think the important thing is if you want to build a sustainable business you’ve got to really do what Cliff says and add value.
Can you make money with thin websites? Sure. Have I made money that way? Absolutely. Did Google do things overnight naming them after flightless birds like Penguin to take some of that money away? Absolutely. The things that hold up are the things that really add value, that’s something we’ve always talked about. I think Cliff has hit it right on the head there. He was running through a bunch of tips there about how you can create a good podcast, but I think content is content whether you’re reading it or delivering it, or giving it somehow on an affiliate website. I think that’s something you should keep in mind whenever you put anything out there on the internet.
Internet Marketing News
You know that I really like Viper Chill, it’s very cool. There was this article on Viper Chill a couple months ago and if you didn’t catch it, it’s a little bit off-putting in the title to be honest with you. It’s an interview with this guy Bill who has made $100,000 in his first week back in 2010 with a poker website. I might not normally read this kind of thing, because a lot of times I’m not really very interested in poker websites and that sort of thing, that’s not really my gig. But it was Viper Chill so I decided to read it. Lo and behold this is one of the better articles that I’ve read in a long time. It’s at ViperChill.com/poker-membership. It’s really an excellent article.
There’s two points in the article. First of all, this guy Bill who builds the site is not just a guy who got lucky building a poker website – this guy is a brilliant internet businessman and I think you’ll agree with me once you read the article. Then the other thing that I take from the article is his punch line at the end of the article is the reason he was successful was because he created real value in the marketplace. He didn’t do it because he was trying to do some trick to make money, he did it because he was really trying to create value.
He says in the article:
“A lot of people are providing products or services because they want to make money off of them, not because they’re offering something of value. That’s where most people get things confused. Don’t go into blogging or business or anything else unless you plan to add value for people.”
I talk about that a lot, that really resonated with me so I thought I’d share that article with you.
You’ve got a real opportunity here because Bill has just started a brand new blog about his internet adventures. I think it’s pretty interesting because Bill is not one of these guys who’s interested in blogging about blogging or blogging about making money online, but he’s decided to do this for other reasons that he discusses on the website. The website is Forever Jobless. I think he’s got two articles up now that are both very good.
The second thing that’s in my reader is something that I stumbled across while working on MasonWorld.com and in fact, thank you so much for the feedback regarding switching over to Late Night Internet Marketing. I definitely plan to do that LateNightIM.com and that change is coming. As part of that change I’ve been working on trying to understand the best way to redirect links.
One of the things that I wanted to do was clean up my permalinks structure. Years ago I set up my permalinks structure on MasonWorld.com back in 2007 to include the category. I don’t like that. Sometimes I want to put posts in multiple categories, so I wanted to get rid of that.
In WordPress 3.3 they finally fixed the performance problem with just having a URL that is a permalink format of just website/postslug. It used to be that if you used website/postslug if you had a lot of posts that could really cause a performance hit because WordPress had to do a database lookup on the postslug and that could cause some real performance problems. They fixed that in WordPress 3.3, which was quite some time ago but I never bothered to figure out how to fix it.
Yoast has a really good article that explains how to change your permalinks, redirect everything without losing search engine traffic, which of course is very important to MasonWorld.com. Inside that post he talks about a tool that he built that will actually generate the code that you need to put in your htaccess file on your website in order to accomplish this.
I thought that was a really good tip, not exactly in my reader and not exactly news, but I wanted to throw that in here. If you want to change your permalink structure on WordPress, you want to see what Yoast recommends, I recommend that you go over to that post at the Yoast website. (http://yoast.com/change-wordpress-permalink-structure/)
He does recommend website.com/postname as the slug formation and that’s what I like too. You’ll see that I’ve changed Mason World over to that.
The last thing that I saw this week that I thought was shocking and amazing was Pat Flynn had an interview with this guy from The Foundation. If you haven’t seen that it’s really quite impressive. It’s over on Pat’s The Smart Passive Income Podcast. I think that interview with Dane Maxwell is SPI Session 46.
Dane strikes me as a really smart guy and he talks about how he is teaching people how to build a lucrative software business even if they don’t have an idea, any expertise, no money, and so forth. It sounds like a cheap ad from the sidebar of a sleazy internet marketing blog, but it’s actually really a compelling interview. This is real guy and in this interview he’ll tell you what he’s doing.
If you haven’t checked it out, I recommend that you go check out Pat’s Session 46. That is actually Pat’s most downloaded podcast session ever, so that’s a pretty cool one to go check out.
That’s what’s in my Google Reader.
Is It Okay to Make Money with Internet Marketing?
We had a little discussion last time about why I do the things that I do, why I podcast. I told you once upon a time I thought it was about the money, but then I found out it was about helping people. The money part still matters. I guess I would probably do this for free, but I don’t know why you would do internet marketing for free necessarily unless you just couldn’t make money.
People do make money with internet marketing. People do make money talking about how to make money and that can be really sleazy. That’s one of the things, quite honestly, that always bothers me about talking about how to make money and then having affiliate income from that. It’s kind of like you’re just cashing in on people’s hopes and dreams. This is a real hot button issue for me and I try to work really hard to be transparent and to make sure that people understand that’s not what I’m all about, because it’s really not.
As you know, Pat publishes these income reports and I always read them. There are always tons of comments. On his last income report some guy responded to Pat’s income report and said, “Hey, I think that you’re full of it, you’re being disingenuous, you’re doing this for the money, you’re selling people hope,” and all this kind of stuff. Pat responded in a nice way and said, “That’s really not what I’m about. This is what I’m about. I’m about helping people and I’m very up front about the fact that I make money, I even disclose all the money that I make.”
I chimed in on the conversation and said, “I understand your point of view, but I know Pat personally and I can tell you what he’s saying is the truth,” and I talk about Pat’s approaches to make money transparently. I said, “If you’re uncomfortable talking to Pat about it, give me a call,” and I left the guy my phone number on Pat’s blog.
He didn’t call me, but somebody else did. Actually, somebody else left me a support ticket and said, “Calling you is impractical because I live in the Southern Hemisphere, but for Pat to make all this money with affiliate income from his blog and claim that that’s just a happy side effect of trying to help people is kind of silly. It appears that this isn’t really a coincidence, but that Pat is sort of being very planful about this and creating something that makes a lot of money. The reality is that 99% of people that Pat is touching will not be able to reproduce his success and the idea that people might be able to do that is silly.” He says it’s nothing personal, he’s just calling like he sees it and feel like Pat talking about how he’s got a clear conscience all the time on SPI is wearing thin.
This is kind of right back in the thing that bugs me. What does this mean? I’ve been reading a book called The Millionaire Mind, which is a really interesting book, and it actually addresses this topic about what attitudes people have about money. If you haven’t read The Millionaire Mind, I think every entrepreneur should read it. I will warn you, there are parts of it that are a little cheesy, it’s a little New Age, it’s got a little bit of the law of attraction kind of stuff in it. But it makes some good points.
Some people feel like you’re either doing good in the world or you’re making money. This isn’t exactly what this guy who emailed me said, but it’s kind of got that overtone that if Pat’s making money it must be that he’s doing something that’s disingenuous or something like that. I can tell you that this is one of the things that really bothers me. I don’t think these two things are mutually exclusive.
If you do something that adds value to somebody’s life, part of that value exchange can easily be money. I think we do that every day. In fact, sort of everything that you pay for in your life, whether it’s ice cream or electricity or your new car, whatever it is you’re exchanging money for value. I think fundamentally that’s what people on this blog and Pat’s blog are doing.
If I say you can buy something through my affiliate link if you’d like and I tell you the truth about it and I’m totally transparent about what I’m doing and you make the choice to make that purchase by reciprocity or if you do that for Pat, I think that’s great.
Money is sort of a necessary thing. Love, goodness, kindness, and hope are all really good and the world needs a lot of that, but they don’t build buildings, they don’t feed and clothe people, they don’t build hospitals – money does that. Money is tool that you use when it’s appropriate. Money is not this evil thing that if you’re making money you must be a bad guy. So this really bugs me.
I don’t want to preach about it. I’m actually kind of curious what you think about it. You guys are listening to this podcast and I wonder what you think about this idea of whether or not it’s okay for somebody to honestly talk about making money online and make a profit from that, or do you think that if you’re going to talk about making money online you should only do that if you’re willing to do it for free.
If you’ve got feedback on that, I would love some voice feedback on that. You can catch me at MasonWorld.com/feedback or you can call me on my voicemail hotline at 214-444-8655. I’d love to hear from you on that topic or if you’re into typing feel free to type a comment in the show notes for Episode 33.
Affiliate Marketing Focus Segment
In order to keep the commitment I made last time, we’re going to start talking every episode about affiliate marketing. It’s my intention over the next 50 or 60 or 100 episodes to spend a few minutes almost every episode talking about affiliate marketing and all the details of affiliate marketing, getting right into everything that you need to know in order to do affiliate marketing. Sort of like a long strung out affiliate marketing course over the next year or so. That’s exactly the kind of thing that this podcast is supposed to be about and I want to add that extra content into here.
First here I just want to refresh, particularly for people who are maybe just now catching the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast and maybe don’t even know what affiliate marketing is. Let’s just recap that a little bit and talk about what I think are the four or five most important things about affiliate marketing. The over future episodes we’re going to break each one of those down and then we’ll break the pieces of that down even further and we’ll just keep unpeeling this onion until we’ve exhausted all the affiliate marketing topics in the world.
Affiliate marketing is this idea that if you have influence over visitors, some way to get traffic, that you can direct that traffic to products on the internet. If those people that you’ve sent to these products complete a transaction with that company you’ll get a commission. That makes you an affiliate and the thing that you’re doing there when you do that, when you send traffic to someone who has merchandise and you get a commission that’s affiliate marketing.
It doesn’t matter where the traffic comes from, you can get it from a variety of places and we’ll talk about all those places. Typically what happens is the merchant will send you a commission check on a monthly basis. So just like every other business on the internet you find an offer, in this case an affiliate offer, and you find a buyer, in this case traffic to your website or traffic that you’ve paid for from pay-per-click ads, and you put those two together.
You match offers with buyers, that’s what marketing on the internet is really all about, and you get a commission because you’re doing that as a service to the merchant that you have an affiliate relationship with.
Those affiliate links are kind of magical things that usually encode your ID in them and usually they set a software state on the computer of the person who is shopping called a cookie. That cookie will help the merchant know that you’re the one that referred the person.
This is exactly like if you’re a Direct TV customer you know that Direct TV will pay you $50 or $100 if you send them a new customer. The reason they do that is because they know what customers are worth. Direct TV pays on customers because they know the lifetime value of a customer. Some people will pay per lead, which means the customer doesn’t even have to buy anything, just knowing the customer is worth money. Most affiliate programs either pay per lead or pay for actual sales.
So that’s what affiliate marketing is. The kind of affiliate marketing that we’re going to be talking about usually is the kind of affiliate marketing where you set up a website and you add content to that website. What you need to do in order to do that is to pick a niche topic for that website so that you can decide exactly what it is that you want it to be about.
You get people to visit that website, usually through search engine traffic, and you give them something of value on that website; information about products that they might be interested in buying, product comparisons or reviews, or commentary about other topics. Then while they’re on that site they may choose to click through and buy something.
So you’ve got to pick the niche, build the website, find the products, then you’ve got to get traffic to the website. Then the other thing that I say that you’ve got to do in order to be successful in affiliate marketing – or that you should do to be successful in affiliate marketing – is make some attempt to capture the email address of that lead while they’re there so you can bring them back again later almost for free.
It’s really cheap if you can capture someone’s email address to bring them back to your website. Instead of going and finding a new lead, you can actually use the leads that you’ve already got. Once you’ve got them in your email autoresponder, as long as you treat them well they’ll come back and buy again and again. If you’re adding value for them they’ll return that favor often times.
Those are the five things we’ll talk about over the next many weeks. We’ll talk about how you find a niche, how you build a website and what you put on it, how you get traffic to the website, and we’ll talk about retaining visitors. We’ll also talk about along the way some mindset and expectation ideas, what should you expect from affiliate marketing, what’s reasonable, what kind of conversion rates do you need to make money, all of those kind of topics. There are many and we’ll talk about all of them that we can think of and any of them that you ask me about.
I’m hoping that in the process as we go through this discussion about affiliate marketing you guys will come in with some questions that you have based on the topics we discuss. That’s the plan for the affiliate marketing discussion here on the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I’m really looking forward to discussing that in the coming weeks.
That’s going to wrap it up for me this week. It’s getting pretty late here in Dallas and I’m headed to Houston tomorrow to celebrate my grandmother’s 90th birthday. Shout out to Mamaw, she’s just so awesome. She’s a ripe old 90 years old and doing pretty well, she’s a spry 90 year old woman. I’m going to call it a day here and I hope you have an absolutely fantastic week.
