Showing personal interest is often one of the most forgotten aspects of marketing and sales.

Whether you’re an affiliate, an affiliate network, entrepreneur, or something else this is very important for you. It’s going to make you significant money this year if you actively employ this approach.

Let’s start with a little example of why I’m writing this.

Rewind a few weeks to Affiliate Summit West 2012. I’m walking the conference floor and I get pitched to by numerous affiliate networks, companies, agencies, etc. They have some really nice pitches, and they are relatively interesting. But, nothing jumped out at me and made me say to myself “I need to take action on this right away”. Do you know why? None of these companies were showing personal interest in me and my situation.

It was pretty bad to the point of most companies didn’t even bother asking me what I did, which is something they should have done with the ambiguously named description on my badge. And, even if I did have an obvious label like “Affiliate” that could have been to throw people off or because it’s just 1 of the things that I do.

Showing genuine interest in what someone does, who they are, what their goals are would be sales 101. However, it’s something that’s not taught that much these days because everyone is concerned with their OWN pitch. It’s kind of like talking to a wall, because if you don’t show any interest you’re not going to make the other person feel connected and want to work with you. In fact, you can have the world’s greatest “pitch” and if you’re pitch doesn’t personally engage them and show interest, your not going to succeed. You will not succeed if you say the exact same thing to every person and don’t know how to adjust based on their personality, their business, their goals, their mindset, their demeanor and a whole lot of other things.

We’re thinking about putting a mentor program together for a couple hand select affiliate networks, individuals and companies that really want to take advantage of the conference marketing and other tactics we’ve been talking about lately. If you want to apply you could email me at brian@dailyconversions.com and tell me about you or your company and I’ll let you know if I see a good fit to helping you grow your business with tactics that your competition aren’t using.

Target or Walmart? Apple or Dell? Google or Bing?  Trader Joes or Whole Foods? Every time you select a product or service, what is the driving reason? Behavioral research indicates one of the key reasons is how the supplier makes you feel based on your expectations.  Subconsciously you make a decision based on the company’s brand – the accumulation of promises and experiences it has offered you.  And brand frequently drives what we are willing to pay for an item. The power of the brand can be the difference between a profitable transaction between you and its supplier, or you passing by and forgoing the business transaction.  As I write this post I am sitting in a Starbucks due to its brand promise of consistent coffee, free wifi and a convenient place to work between meetings.

On the internet, brand is the key differentiator between success and failure for your business.  Your brand is a promise to your visitors and a motivator for them to return again and again.  It empowers and brings comfort for readers to take action on the banners that bring you revenue.  Trusted sites bring trusted action, confusing sites bring a quick scan and a jump to the next site on the list.  In a world where there are millions of destinations and where content is being created at an increasing rate, brand is critical for building your business.  In other words, it makes you more than a URL.

Years ago, McGraw Hill ran a famous ad that really drove home the point of a brand.  A disgruntled older man in a suit faced the reader and asked: “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know your company. I don’t know your company’s product. I don’t know what your company stands for. I don’t know your company’s customers. I don’t know your company’s record. I don’t know your company’s reputation. Now what was it you wanted to sell me?” In this fairly brief statement the gentleman made the point that knowledge of a company, these days called the brand or brand promise, it a motivator for action.

What is your brand?  Informal?  Humorous? Pretentious? Inconsistent?  What do you want the world to remember about you and your site?  What consistent value do you want them to leave with after an experience?  Building a great site is about a clear and strong voice, a clear and strong identity.  It is about connecting at a level where the reader knows and cares who you are.  It is about a clear and strong brand.

Next time, we’ll explore the value of your brand as it relates to success.

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RJ Sharer is a guest blogger who brings more than 20 years of B2B marketing experience.  He specializes in helping start-ups achieve success.  This post is the first in a series.

I’ve been toying with the idea of finally putting my split testing system down on paper and sharing it with the world.

I’m looking for feedback on what you guys think, if that’s something you’re interested in us releasing on Daily Conversions.

If so, would you rather:

1. Get it for free (knowing that many many others would be getting it too)
2. Get it inexpensively (knowing that some others would be getting it too)
3. Get it a reasonable price (knowing only a smaller group would be getting it too)

Your input is important and in this world when competition is high we are curious if you guys are looking for more of an inexpensive system (that will be used by many people) or more of an exclusive system with hardly any competition.

The goal of the split testing system is to create it in a way that you could know (virtually) nothing about a given niche, offer or marketing campaign and split test you way to success and profit with it.

I’d love to hear some feedback!

A lot of Internet and Affiliate Marketers, don’t use batching at all and it’s a total productivity killer. This means you are making 1 cookie at a time rather than 20 or 30 cookies at once. Case in point, sending emails. Every time you login to your email program/site and open up emails, you are probably taking several extra seconds to minutes each time you do that, rather than if you did all of your emails 1, 2 or 3 times per day instead of constantly. Essentially, by responding to emails dozens of times per day you are going to be wasting time, same as you would if you made 1 cookie at a time all day rather than 1 or 2 big batches at once.

Here’s another example. Do you use an online chat program? You are probably wasting minutes to HOURS per day. And, no I’m not saying that online chats are a waste of time, in fact they are very beneficial, but you need to know how to batch properly. Let’s look at an example…

Let’s say that I’m using Skype or AIM and having an online chat with someone. Chances are I’m also waiting for them to respond after I write what I want to write. That means I’m wasting a lot of time by waiting for responses, minutes to hours per day. Instead, a better technique would be to respond every 10, 20, 30, 60 minutes instead of just constantly responding. It might not make the people you’re talking with as happy to have to wait between what they write, but if you use this even 50% of the time you’re probably going to notice minutes to hours per day of extra time if you have a lot of online chat conversations. If you don’t want to make anyone wait, another technique is to set aside X amount of time for all conversations and batch all of your conversations and multi-task the conversations.

Batching is not new either, huge corporations like VistaPrint have based their entire business model around a batching process to be able to sell printed paper goods really inexpensively. Without batching, they would probably be out of business!

I challenge you to find ways that you can batch similar tasks and see at the end of the week if you gained extra time to do something more beneficial than waiting around for responses or wasting time opening closing and reopening email programs and things of that nature.

I’m pretty good at creating useful rants, that actually help people so I thought I’d put this together for you guys.

These are in no particular order by the way.

My Internet Marketing & Affiliate Marketing Pet Peeves:

• Have you ever been on Facebook.com and tried to get to the “Advertising” area and upon scrolling down the page just kept expanding to infinity and you couldn’t get to the link? This drives me insane that I have to type in Facebook.com/ads/ Is it just  me or should the kings of social media have an easier way to click from Facebook to the Ads?
• Affiliate managers that want to talk everything but business.
• People too good for consulting aka ego maniacs that don’t like money.
• Affiliates that copy campaigns, and are too shallow to realize that a lot of people “test” and lose money and they falsely think that it “must be profitable” when it’s not. Facebook and Google love you guys!
• People emailing me 3x a day begging for help. Look, I  understand that some people have bad situations, but don’t tell me your parents were killed in a car accident and that you’re being shipped off to a foster house. THEN, when I call your parents and they are alive and well, you’re the one that looks like the fool (true story.)
• People not fully using their skills. Look, I know a lot of you guys like your $100, $250, $1000/day affiliate campaigns, but guess what they won’t always be there. Build up a local customer base while you’re raking in the cash and when that affiliate campaign runs out, you’ll have a nice business that could be at the same level at that point. I’ll practically tell you how to do it even at Local Consultant Training.

• It’s easy to keep spending and not see it as “spent money” since you are delaying it so long.
• If you run into any scams, unauthorized rebills, or have any unauthorized charges that you have to dispute, they will close your account down in a heart beat.

Recently, this happened to me. I was using the Amex Plum and I had a bunch of unauthorized charges. I had to open a dispute for all of the 20+ unauthorized charges, and close down my card. Then, I get a call from my account manager asking about it, because the same thing happened last year. I let her know that I make a lot of online transactions so who knows who is getting my card number and trying to use it online/in person. The difference was that this year the card physically got used. Boy oh boy, they weren’t happy with that and closed the account down.

So, just a word of warning that even stuff beyond your control like having a card stolen and used without your permission will shut down your “affiliate line of credit” so to speak. Although I wasn’t really utilizing my card that much as a funding source for any affiliate campaigns right now, if I was I would have been really upset!

I guess the message they are sending is, “Use our cards, but don’t dispute anything even if they are unauthorized, or we will shut you down because we have to pay people in China to handle those disputes.”

I was once a big fan of Amex, now I am not.

Who has some good alternatives?

With any business that many people are not familiar with, there are many myths that are not true.

Myth #1 – Consultants have to be on the phone or in meetings all the time.

While it’s true that clients do need to call meetings here and there, there’s nothing in the Local Consultant handbook that says that you have to be in meetings all day. In fact, most consultants do best and get most done for their clients outside of meetings. Personally, consulting that I’ve done, I find that most meetings are merely updates than anything else and a lot of the clients that I work with don’t need to be handheld, they just need someone (me) that has expertise in a certain area in which they do not.

Myth #2 – Consultants are “on call” all the time by their clients.

This also could not be further from the truth. In fact, even when I have a major client or two, they still don’t utilize all my time and if they did they wouldn’t be getting my best work because I would be overwhelmed. I’m very cautious about who I work with because I don’t want to be forced into a corner, I like to be free from restrictions and able to work the way I work best, my own way. It’s called effective time management. If you sign a consulting deal and agree to give all of your time, you are not a consultant, you are an employee. Huge difference! Just be upfront in the beginning in terms of how much of your time you are committing at a given rate. If they won’t agree to it, ask for more money or turn it down. There is a lot of power in turning things down. Trust me, there are millions of companies that need consultants all over the world. There is not shortage of work, you just have to learn how to position yourself.

Myth #3 – You need experience being a consultant to be a consultant.

People that ask me this question clearly just have a few screws loose. If you think about it, this is impossible. If you HAVE to have experience being a consultant to be a consultant, then there would be no consultants. In fact, I started as a consultant after I had done successful projects on my own, it wasn’t until way later that I started working with other companies, and eventually I got into consulting a bit, which I still do today a bit with CPA networks and some local businesses and that accounts for roughly 20% of my income, in total. And I’ll be damned if it would take up anywhere near all of my time. That’s the reason I’m effective because I can agree to be a consultant for a couple different companies for a relatively small amount of money, whereas if I charged what I’m actually worth and tried to make 100% of my income from consulting, it would be very expensive and impossible for companies to pay out that kind of money. I also like to keep some room open in-case any additional dream clients come along, I don’t like to feel tied down.

Consulting can be quite fulfilling.

Let’s say that there is a project that you really want to do and you know a company with a budget and means to put you in a position to start a project. This is where consulting becomes really fun. Essentially you can now have the means to start the project that you didn’t have the budget for and have a team around you (this company);  The key is simply getting more than a flat fee to stay motivated beyond your weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly pay. Make sure you charge what you are worth or you will regret it!

Don’t be offended if a client doesn’t follow your master plan.

This was one of the hardest realities I had to face when starting as a consultant years and years ago. Many clients simply value your input and your objections but may never take action on a single thing you suggest, even though you are still providing value in this case, factors beyond your control doesn’t get the action items in place. This is something you can’t blame on yourself, because you can tell someone something is going to work till you are blue in the face but if they don’t go with it, you can’t spend the rest of your life trying to convince them. This is something more consultants need to learn early on that they are simply a tool rather than the CEO. The consultants don’t have the final call, that’s just how it is. Now if you were a project manager, expectations would be totally different. Don’t let you ego get in the way, and at the end of the day if you know they are going to make $1,000s of dollars more per day by following your plan than creating their own, and they don’t agree to it, there’s only so much you can do to convince them.

Steps to become a Local Consultant

1. Find a mentor. I’ll post more about this in the next week.
   
2. Start talking to local businesses about their needs.
3. Position yourself as the solution to their needs (make sure you can back up your claims.)
4. Repeat for all of the small businesses in town, start small and grow until you are working with online clients like Google or whoever else is right around your corner.

When I was younger, I was involved in some martial arts. It was really fun and I’m bummed that I didn’t stick with it more. Recently, I’ve been getting back into it and it’s really a blast. I see a lot of traits that are common amongst martial artists that I think most internet marketers should adopt.

I’m going to break down what I’ve learned from these great martial artists. I really think you guys will see the cross over into Internet Marketing.

Randy Couture

Extremely intelligent. It seems Randy’s strategy in the octagon is to outsmart his opponent and use his strengths against his opponents weaknesses. You will never see Randy in a straight up slug fest, nor will you see him talking much trash. He’s extremely well spoken and articulate in person and that shows in the octagon as well by his ability to almost always outsmart the opponent.

One of the really cool and interesting things about Randy is that he has his own gym in Vegas called XTREME Couture and he always invites different fighters to come over and train there with him. I’ve even seen him invite opponents he has fought in the past to come train and work on each-others weaknesses. I really think a lot of internet marketers should be doing a lot more collaborative work and ‘training’ and working with their past competitors on new ventures.

Dana White

Although Dana White is not exactly a fighter I would still have to say that he is a martial artist at heart. More interestingly, he’s a very effective businessman. He reminds me a lot of me in how he conducts business. He’s very frank, very to the point and just wants to get stuff done and get everyone paid. He’s a deal maker at heart and doesn’t take no for an answer. It makes sense that he was a manager before he was the President of the multi-billion dollar UFC.

Aggressive, in your face and not taking BS, this is the bulldozer style that people need to adapt in tough business situations. If you are an affiliate marketer trying to negotiate higher payouts, you could learn a thing or two from Dana

Forrest Griffin

This guy basically jump started the UFC to what it is today. He leaves his heart (and blood) in the Octagon, every single time he fights. He’s a balls to the wall fighter and is not going down without literally getting knocked out. Watch a couple Forrest Griffin interviews and you’ll see his “I won’t quit” attitude and how that’s got him to be one of the premium fighters in the world.

Internet marketers could learn something from this dude for sure. How can you not love the guy that just wont quit until he can’t swing anymore. I think a lot of internet marketers give up way too learn and it’s a total shame. I know a lot of guys that were so close to profit, and instead they gave up and made nothing.

Anderson Silva

I have a sort of interesting story about Anderson Silva that you might like. When I was at UFC 66 meeting all these guys and hanging out with Randy Couture and Big John McCarthy, I ran into a situation where I only had the chance to meet either Anderson Silva or Tito Ortiz. At the time, the main fight card was Tito Ortiz vs Chuck Liddell… so Tito was in the spotlight. The guy that setup this awesome opportunity for me asked me which of the two I wanted to meet more. I told him that I would much rather meet Anderson Silva because (even though he didn’t speak much English) I thought he was one of the best fighters to ever compete in the sport. Tito on the other hand, while being a good fighter, certainly isn’t at the same level as Anderson Silva. I considered Anderson to be one of the best in the world at the time. Fast forward 5 years, Anderson Silva has pretty much gone undefeated in the past 5 years and is considered the best fighter the world has ever seen. I’m really glad that I had the opportunity to meet him.

What I learned from Anderson? Calm. Dedication. Get in your opponents head. This guy is ice before a fight, but he’s a trash talking wild-man at the weigh-ins when the opponent is in front of his face. He knows how to get into the head of his opponent, even though he doesn’t speak the same language as 80% of them! Anderson is perhaps also very intelligent for using trainers that most fighters wouldn’t think to use, such as Steven Seagal. I think this is very smart, even if Steven Seagal doesn’t train Mixed Martial Arts which is what the UFC is. He still has 30 years of being an Aikido master and very gifted martial artist. For the record, Anderson Silva won his last fight vs Vitor Belfort with a move that was taught to him by Steven Seagal. Most UFC fighters would never think to try to end a fight with a move like that.

Learn from other industries and people

I’m always learning from whoever I can. I’m working a new start-up that helps others learn from the super successful people before them. I really hope to be able to announce the project to you guys very soon, once it’s in full swing. I think you’re going to love it!

I’m proud to introduce you guys to BLAM Ads, a very successful Incentive driven affiliate network. I’m posting up this BLAM Ads review because they have recently launched their 3.0 version of their Content Locking Gateway. It’s quite amazing and I wanted to give you a little tour and tell you a little about it.

How can you make money with their content locking gateway and incentive offers?

1) Very easily. In fact, all you have to do is login their backend pictured below and select the offer you want to run over your content and it will generate the code in 2 seconds for you.

2) Configure the settings in the boxes and you now have a template that you can use. Here’s an example of a very basic template that you can setup with BLAM.

3) Slap the code right on your site and that will come up over your content.

How does this make you more money?

The incentive offers that pop up over your site, offer an additional layer of monitization. The content locking, literally ‘locks’ your content until they complete an offer. I find that a lot of people will complete those offers and in turn, it will make your content more valuable – because it seems harder to access.

Pretty simple isn’t it? People are making some serious bank cashing in on this method of monitization. A lot of affiliate marketers in particular are just used to the standard was of making money that they forget (or don’t know) how easy it is to setup a content based site and they used incentivized offers to cash in.

Sign up to BLAM then login to the Content Gateway here: http://gateway.blamads.com/affiliate

Enjoy your increased revenue, you can thank me later

It bothers me when affiliates approach me and say that they can’t think of any way to get cash to do their affiliate marketing in the paid traffic realm. Pick one of the 3 options below depending on your situation, credit history and contacts and enjoy the benefits

Amex Plum

The benefit for Affiliate Marketers is that you can Defer up to 90% of your balance for 30 days.

Here’s a scenario. You charge $5,000 up on your Amex Plum, and considering it’s in their “Open” line you can usually charge $5k, $10k without much of a problem. There’s technically no limit. Now, you’ve charged $5k for a media buy or something like that and now you only owe 10% after your billing cycle is up if you choose to defer it  (up to 30 days depending on when you charge it) then in additional if you pay that 10% you have another 30 days until your next billing cycle to pay the remainder. There is no interest at all on this. Basically free money for an extra 45-60 days, interest free.

Strategic Investors

I’ve been known for doing this from time to time. I’ll approach an investor and give them a nice cut in exchange for funding. I’ll usually only do this if I know it’s going to cost more money than I have in my piggy bank at the moment or if I’m already tapped out on my Amex Plum for the month. $5k, $10k for an investor is nothing in exchange for the potentially (very) rewarding returns that affiliate marketing can bring.

Don’t know any investors and don’t have any contacts? Start talking to people about what you are doing. Chances are if you are doing something profitable enough someone will just stand up and make you an offer you can’t refuse. I’ve had people make me offers without really even hinting that I was looking for funding. It’s all about transparency and just talking to people to setup these kind of strategic investor / partnerships.

Small Business Loan

I’ve taken these out before. If you have a little history of spending X and making X+Y then you can easily get one. You just tell them that you need additional capital to scale up your business and show them proof that the advertising is working. Simple as that they will give you a loan with that kind of proof and history. Walk in to any bank on your corner and you can easily get $10k, $20k or more. The interest will be dependent on your credit though, so you need good credit to not get hammered on fees. If you already have good credit sometimes you can get a pretty low rate and then make extra payments each month (or pay it off in full when your big checks roll in).