This is what the people who aren’t making any money are screaming from the rooftops.  Is it true? Well has the real estate market crashed for real estate investors? No, people that had bad business plans lost millions and went under. If your business plan was flip-this-house, right now you’re probably waiting for the next seminar so you can punch one of those real estate Guru’s in the eye.  But, the people that bought based on solid investment principles and had a solid long-term business plan are by in large doing just fine.  It is the same with internet marketing.

The people that jumped in with no business plan and were looking to get rich quick have been sorely disappointed. Why?  They have no business plan. Let’s get down to brass tacks.  You get paid to sell products to customers or generate leads for advertisers, period. That is it. Whether you do it through ppv, ppc, media buys or running butt naked down the highway with your website painted on your back same thing. Don’t get caught up in traffic methods. It does not matter how you get the traffic to your site, what matters is the ability to get conversions.

The question of hot offers. Does it matter what offer is hot? Yes of course it does. But, only if you have traffic that converts. Having a killer billboard on a street that no one drives down does not bring in thousands of sales.  Once you have the traffic.. which means a converting ad, a good landing page, the offers on the backend become interchangeable.

How do you get to the money? Testing. The tools will change. The marketing methods may change but the principles remain the same.  We’re in the business of sales not software.  Getting the new this or the new that is cool, but if you don’t know how to get conversions you need to change your traffic source, your ad copy, your landing page, or the offer. That is it. No bells no whistles.  Getting better tools can increase your conversion rate, but all the software in the world does not guarantee you more conversions.  The goal is selling, period!

It sucked when we were children, it sucked when we were teenagers, and guess what it still sucks. Do you know what Kobe Bryant, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, and Greg Davis have in common? They are students of the games they play. They study and they research.  They make mistakes and get back at it. They hate losing. Don’t get the affiliate game twisted. It is not a lifetime of partying all day and popping Champaign bottles. It’s work.

The only thing sure in life is that you are at the mercy of your choices. Either you choose to sacrifice and put in the work to get good at what you do or you look for short cuts and suffer. Are there short cuts to get to the money? Yes, but only after you have the principles down. What are the principles? What is my cost per customer acqusition? How do I optemize?How to choose offers? What are the metrics? What is my target conversion rate? Where are my customers? What do my customers like? What do they watch? How do they think? Did they graduate from college? Where do they live? How do they talk? How can I target them better? What gets them emotional?

Abraham Lincoln once said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Rather than throwing traffic and money at a page you’re direct linking too, how about throwing all those test clicks at a presell page. Use those test clicks to optimize a good lander. If you know that for the product you’re trying to market news style landers are working grab one and put your own twist on it.

Now one of the things I wanted to address was the questions that I’ve been getting from some of my affiliates about ppv marketing. Does it work? Yes. But, only if you know what you’re doing. Ask your account managers at your traffic source(traffic vance, directcpv, media traffic, etc..). They know what’s hot on their platform. PPV marketing is like the penny slot machines in Vegas. If you don’t know what you’re doing you‘re still going to lose money it’s just a slower bleed. The basic questions still apply. Does that ppv platform have your target demographic? What url’s will your ads be shown on? How do they target? If they have no way of targeting and you have no way of tracking then you might as well go to the bathroom, open up your wallet, dump your cash and credit cards into the toilet, and flush.

The most successful affiliates understand the business aspect of the industry. They ask the important questions. They do things by the numbers. They have systems in place. They have people who build their landing pages; they have specialists who they hire to assist in different aspects of their business. They follow trends and know what people are looking for. They stay up to date on what is going on in the news and factor it into their marketing. They watch Oprah and Rachel Ray if that is what their target demographic is watching. Remember no matter how many bottles of Champaign you pop, how many lambo’s you buy, how many watches you have, this is still a business. If you want to be number one then you outwork, out hustle, and out grind the competition.

If you’re in the affiliate marketing space or affiliate marketing is the way you make your daily living,  then more then likely you’ve heard the name “Jonathan Volk” mentioned a time or two. If not, then you’re not really keeping up on your industry and it’s time to do a bit more reading. Anyways, besides Jonathan being a true active super affiliate & a down to earth nice chap, he publishes a very respected affiliate marketing blog at www.jonathanvolk.com. Jonathan coaches & trains new and experienced affiliate marketers on different marketing methods he uses to make a very nice living online. This is one online marketer you want to pay attention too, out of the thousands of other resources that claim to offer help, but are really just looking to make a quick buck.

Just the other day Jonathan released an in depth 52 page guide  on affiliate marketing.  Here’s a short statement from Jonathan about his newly released guide.

Jonathan says:

“In this guide, I go over the techniques that I have used to generate over $4 million dollars in affiliate marketing commissions including PPC, PPV, Media Buying and Social Media Affiliate marketing!

I have been working extremely hard on this guide and I believe that it will be of great benefit for both newbies and more experienced affiliate alike… I mean, even if you get just one good nugget, it was worth it right? Well, I plan on many of you getting more than one nugget. ”

So don’t waste anymore time, if you want to download the guide please register via this link:

JonathanVolks Affiliate Markting Guide