Since tomorrow I’m doing a video interview with Clickbooth I decided to test out my webcam by doing a video blog! Enjoy!

With the recent sell of my first online business, I look back on the experience as a successful yet frustrating process.  There really is no better learning tool for selling a business than actual experience but the problem is… it’s usually not something you do everyday as an entrepreneur.  Here are five tips that I think will be most helpful in the event that you have to sell your business in my latest experience.

1. Cutting the emotions – If you are on the fence about selling your business for a long time, you probably are running way too high on emotions.  As I said, this was the first business that I started a 16 year old kid and this was my baby.  I nurtured it, I cared for it, I dumped thousands of dollars and hours into this precious business and now I’m going to kick it to the curb like it’s nothing?!  This business was my identity and my identity was this business.  However, I came to a point a couple months back whenever I was looking at financial statements, losing sleep at night, and dealing with other problems when I said that this just isn’t worth it anymore.  I considered my history with the business and how much success it has brought me and decided to make a strictly business decision that I’ve had a good run.  Once I cut the emotions away from the equation, it was an obvious answer to sell.

2. Announcing the sale – I spent a couple of days brainstorming potential buyers for my business.  I have never been a fan of putting sites up on marketplaces for just anyone to grab, especially if my identity was so closely tied to the business for so long.  You never know what the future owner will do with the business and if you have a contact list of potential buyers, you may not only be able to get the price you want but also the reassurance of an honest customer to take over the reins.  I chose to keep my sale private for this reason but also for the fact that it would make the users of my site more comfortable.  If they thought the owner was jumping ship and they had no idea it was going to someone trustworthy, they might jump ship as well; therefore leaving the business with even less active users than before and ultimately becoming less valuable.

3. Methods of communication – I found e-mail to be the most efficient way to negotiate the business deals for a number of reasons.  It was easy to document, proper grammar and spelling was frequent and the ease of being able to strategize your decision-making and negotiating was very important.  AIM or a phone conversation didn’t seem like the wise choice for me as I like to proofread and go over what I’m going to say a number of times to prevent confusion.

4. Never accept first offer – My father isn’t exactly a businessman but what he’s always told me when I spoke to him about selling my business was to never take the first offer. I’m not exactly suggesting lie to a potential buyer about having another offer but I’m sure as you may know it’s very frequent in sales.  Give good reason for the first offer to be rejected and offer a reasonable counter-offer that will make both parties happy.

5. Hire a lawyer – This is practically a no-brainer but I figured I would mention it anyways because even I’ve made a similar mistake before.  No matter how well you know the potential buyer or seller, ALWAYS get a lawyer to write up every little detail in a contract.  I’ve relied on handshakes before and it has cost me many hours and many dollars to fix these problems, and these handshakes have been with “friends” I’ve had for years.

Have you found any other essential tips to getting top dollar for your business? Sound off in the comments section.

Just returned from my trip to the beach with some family over at OBX in NC and finally feeling like I’m fully recharged after the last few months.   Every once in a while I’ll take a trip for a weekend but it’s really the week-long ones where I don’t think of anything involving affiliate marketing and do things I can’t do with the distraction of a computer in front of me that allow me to come back refreshed and ready to pound out hours in front of the computer again.  Finch over at FinchSells has always hit it home, in my opinion, with certain emotional topics like getting burned out with affiliate marketing and it got me thinking…

“The WickedFire mindset”, as he labels it, brainwashes us that we need to spend 24/7 in front of a computer in order to be that extra step ahead of competition.  Anyone who doesn’t or anyone who criticizes this mindset is simply labeled as lazy!  I was once under this mindset and sometimes I do still subconsciously think like that.  Sometimes I feel guilty when I go play golf or go sit by the pool for a few hours.   When I realize this feeling of guilt, I always step back and say, “what the fuck?  This is EXACTLY why you are working online, so you can do this…”

Here are a couple of things I have found to be effective in my 5 and a half years of working online in order to keep your sanity and your batteries charged, or at least making it so you don’t feel like you have to recharge your batteries every other week in order to keep yourself from bursting with rage.

- Find an physical stress reliever. I’ve always played basketball and soccer but after high school I didn’t really have a place or time to do it between school work and affiliate marketing.  I’ve turned to working out this summer as I have the past few summers and running 2-3 miles a day.  This has helped me immensely and I instantly feel less frustrated afterwards.  I’ve noticed on days that I don’t do this, I literally want to smash my keyboard and burn my credit card after every snag in a campaign.   The trick to helping me the most is doing it in the morning before I do much more than check e-mail.  Setting off in the right mindset in the very beginning of your day helps me the most for me because if I’m frustrated doing something it’s hard to go back to doing that same task with a completely new mindset after working out.

- Music. This one is pretty obvious but again starting music as I shower and get ready for the day is the absolute key.   A lot of people claim they just can’t find music they like, for those people I suggest checking out Pandora.  It’s amazing how many people know about it but don’t use it.  I literally don’t turn off my music from the time I get up to the time I sleep.   Right now I’m a big fan of Lupe Fiasco, Wiz Khalifa, Drake, and Curren$y.  (All of which refer to making money ironically… )

- Limited Sacrifices. This one is a big one for me and one that I only recently stood back and realized.   Everyone always says that you have to make sacrifices to succeed, that’s obvious.  However, you have to draw the line somewhere or else you are going most likely going to be miserable at the end of the day.  I am extremely busy as I try to balance college and affiliate marketing and during the first semester of college I sacrificed a lot of college time in order to spend time on my affiliate marketing work.  I would literally answer emails while a girl was sitting on my lap begging to watch a movie or whatever.  It sounds so pathetic/embarrassing but it’s true, she would get so mad at me for prioritizing the computer over her.  I just never knew where to draw the line and a lot of people have this same problem.  I’ve never turned down a party on a Friday/Saturday night or anything but there have been many times when I’ve turned down a game of poker or something of the like because I would much rather refresh my stats or work on getting this media buy live before 2:00.   I guess this line is for you to decide but stepping back and saying, I’ll never be able to experience this again and this campaign or blog post can wait is so crucial.   If you have a family, you should see many of the same type of circumstances.  Sacrificing your personal time is what will lead you to success, sacrificing a unique time you could be spending with others will almost always be regrettable in my opinion, even if it means dollar signs.

- Enjoying the Fruits of Your Affiliate Marketing Labor. I’m not a baller and I never will be with my spending.  I have a taste of disgust when I look on Facebook and people I know in affiliate marketing are flashing their pictures of their new cars, watches, houses, and etc.  (Birdman is the exception for various reasons, heh) It’s important not to be a tightwad, and regrettably I have been for the past couple of years.  I have trouble shelling out money for anything that I don’t feel is “necessary”.  Perhaps it’s because I used to spend like a madman when I made chump change as a kid, and always would get scolded for it.  (Cue the Jewish jokes) One thing I don’t have a problem with spending are experiences.  Being able to drop everything and spend $500 on a plane ticket to New Orleans or NYC is an awesome power to have that I may never have for the rest of my life.  Exercising this opportunity on a regular basis with friends is one of the best fruits of affiliate marketing labor!

- Making a Routine. This one is kind of strange to think of because of the fact that affiliate marketing is probably one of the hardest things to make a routine to follow.  The constant changing and inconsistency of campaigns is very aggravating but if you are experienced in a certain area, you can at least develop a routine to-do list habit the night before and nail things down.  I’ve found getting a piece of paper out and doing a to-do list every night increase my productivity immensely.   There’s something a routine does for me that keeps me sane and less mentally exhausted because otherwise I try to do a million things at the same time and spend the whole day just thinking of what I have to do instead of actually doing it.

These are the practices that I’ve figured out the hard way through working online for almost 6 years now.  What types of things keep you sane?

For those of you generating your affiliate marketing traffic via pay-per-view (or cost-per-view) I want you to look at your stats right now and notice where the majority of your ROI (return on investment) is coming from. Nine out of ten chances your conversions are coming from keyword/URL targets that have very low clicks but high conversion rates. Since starting Internet University I’ve noticed a lot of people fail with pay-per-view traffic because they all want to bid on the same targets/keywords as everyone else.

A bidding war can be one of the worst things for you campaigns and even if you win the ‘war’ chances are another affiliate is eventually going to challenge you again. There are literally hundreds of millions of websites on the Internet. To be successful driving traffic via pay-per-view you need to take the time to go out and find where there is NO competition. Notice the below screenshot:

(I apologize I accidentally ran the report with another campaign that’s why the first two rows are black)

I took this from one of my Prosper installations yesterday. I setup a campaign just for this blog post to prove my point correct. Notice the target with 1,041 clicks. It has 1 conversion (0.10%). This traffic was around $0.01 per view. The offer I was using pays $1.50 so I lost $8.91 on this particular target. Notice the target with 8 clicks (views). Paying just $0.08 for these views I generated $3! 3650% ROI! This is what I like to call the ‘hidden gems’ of pay-per-view. This is where profitable campaigns come from.

The pain with this, is it takes many hours to find targets that everyone isn’t bidding on. This is one of the main reasons you’re not going to get rich over night. Campaigns take days, weeks, sometimes even months to build. The harder and more creative you work to find these targets, the more generous you’re going to be paid. So next time you’re setting up a pay-per-view campaign or when you’re looking at scaling your current campaigns keep this post in mind!

On a side note, I announced yesterday in Internet University that soon we’re going to be holding ‘competitions’. This is where everyone will work on a particular campaign together and we’ll all share ideas/landing pages/etc. We won’t share sensitive information such as particular keywords/traffic sources, but rather our ROI and campaign status. In my opinion this is going to create a new ‘hands on’ way to learn how to make money online. If you’re not signed up you may want to get in before the first competition begins (most likely the first week of August). You can do so at this link.

Ryan and Richard’s popular wrestling site was contacted by a seemingly new company that has developed a brilliant twist on the popular Captcha system that shields sites from automated bots while increasing advertising revenue.  The company, AdCopy, guarantees that this innovation of the Captcha protection will increase your advertising dollars by having them type in a brand for a high chance of retentive memorization, instead of just a random string of characters similar to below:

The email they received furthers states that, “Every time a Type-In is completed, we share a portion of the revenue generated with you. What’s more, you need not worry about the ad diverting users from your site; unlike other ads, the Type-In™ unit is not clickable.”  So essentially, this is just creating another opportunity for you to make money with little to no work in my eyes.  It seems like it’s a pretty easy guarantee for them to make for it to increase your advertising revenue, especially with their claim that CPM’s are $1-$20, in a placement that you probably were making $0 to chump change on.

On the advertiser side, I’m very curious if they allow people to sign up and create campaigns.  This would be a very unique opportunity but obviously it seems like it would mostly be for branding advertisers.  However, I would consider starting a campaign if you could limit certain niches/sites to your advertisement so you could laser target your campaigns close enough to yield a good response.  If you had a simple domain to remember, you could probably effectively get at least a few visitors to your site but the lack of ability for clicking may drastically hurt your “type-in ratio”, heh.  (Technically, not “CTR” since no clicking…)

The program is still in beta so I’m not sure if they are only limiting it to people the business development manager reached out to or not but if you link this blog post in your application, you might be in luck. Richard and Ryan haven’t implemented this system yet as Ryan is on vacation but if they decide to I’ll be sure to have a follow-up post with their review.   Evidently many of the same investors who invested in Google, Facebook, and Twitter see promise in their program according to their claims, so there is some serious promise in this new technology in my opinion.

If you’ve tried a similar program or used AdCopy before, let me know in the comments section.  I’m very curious if this lives up to the hype!

If you think that media buys are no longer profitable since re-bill offers have came under fire, think again.  I wrote a guess post on Zac Johnson’s blog where I discuss how promoting CPS offers via a media buy can equate to some massive profits!  For those of you unfamiliar with Zac, he’s been working online as long as I have (since 1998) and is someone I have a ton of respect for.  He’s also a very successful and well known blogger in the Internet Marketing industry!  You can check out my guest post at the link below:

Cashing In On Media Buys Without Re-bill Offers

Washing away the bad taste in your mouth after the painful results from a failing campaign can be a tough task for every affiliate marketer, especially the heavy hitters who are looking at x,xxx or xx,xxx losses right off the bat.  I personally hit a dry spell myself a few weeks back where it seemed like all my campaign ideas were futile efforts against the affiliate marketing gods.   I developed a few points to go over to get my planning back on track and it proved successful with a couple of our recent  campaigns.

The first step to getting back on track is taking a break.  Chances are frustration is still looming as you are paying off that credit card bill or checking your bank account to see the bleeding numbers.  The key here is stress relief, I personally like to take a couple hours off, sometimes even a personal day, to wash my car, play golf, spend time with friends, etc.  The World Cup is a great stress relief this month especially. (If they ever ban the vuvuzelas, that is…)

Once you can stand to login to your PPV account without cringing, it’s time to get back to the chopping block.  The most efficient way I have found is to look back at what you did wrong.  Take out a piece of paper and check to see if you can brainstorm what you did wrong.    What can you learn from this experience?  I always tell myself, it’s only a true loss if I cannot pull any type of lesson or information from it.  Information that I can base on a second campaign is a valuable investment and not a loss at all.

Once you’ve figured out what you’ve done wrong, take a look at your previous successful campaigns and the methods you took to getting them successful in the first couple of stages.  Most importantly, did you test efficiently or did you pull the plug too early?  Check out my previous article for some tips to go over for a media buying campaign in particular.  Make sure to apply these tactics/methods in your next attempt.

Lastly, try not to think about how much you lost and the fact that if your future campaigns fail it just builds to more losses.  This is pessimistic thinking and will cause you to subconsciously take less of a risk on your future campaigns, and possibly cause you to flip the off switch quicker than usual.  You should clear your head and remember… no risk, no reward.  Additionally,  if you keep this negative number in your head and happen to achieve profitability on your next campaign, the gains may not be as sweet because you are just digging yourself out of a hole you created previously.

I like to think a little more than luck helped me bounce back from my dry spell and these principles did get me back on track.   Are there any special thought processes you go through as an affiliate marketer to bounce back from a negative campaign?  Can you take it with a grain of salt and keep on grinding or do you dwell on it for days?  I think the more experienced you become as a marketer and the more dollars you gain, the less and less a failing campaign can effect you and your checking account as long as you implement these principles.

No matter how many handfuls of campaigns you’ve managed to get profitable in your affiliate marketing career, there are always fundamental lessons that you learn time and time again.  Ryan and I turned all our focus to a particular media buying campaign this past week to brainstorm creatives, landing pages, and offers once we figured out a prime traffic source.  Here are a couple of lessons that have continued to hold true with all our campaigns that helped us get this campaign to making us ~$1,000 a day…

#1: The more variables that you have between creatives, landing pages, and offers, the more you should be spending.  Most amateur marketers make this mistake as their budget dives down and their CPA commissions balance halts so they try to cancel out elements before they can actually bloom.  One rule of thumb is that we always keep campaigns running for 24 hours.  There are exceptions to this of course… For example, if you are down triple or quadruple the CPA goal; but be careful, sometimes high volume traffic sources are so fast-paced that your commissions just can’t catch up from the initial get-go.   We always develop a blueprint of our campaign by saying how much we are going to spend on each individual landing page that we are testing based on the CPA.  This goal is very generous and we are 90% sure at this point that the landing page/creative will not work out for our campaign at this point of elimination.  Additionally, testing it for 24 hours allows us to see how different times of the day effect our conversions so if the campaign does turn out to be profitable we can further optimize by day parting.

#2: It’s not always what you think will work best, especially creative-wise.  We tried a couple of polished stock photos for our banners and then threw in an amateur photo just for the hell of it.  Judging from this post, you can probably guess which one performed the best and is our ultimate winning creative right now that’s making us bank.   Always, always use a wide variety of creatives that seem to have random styles, fonts, pictures.  Using the same formats and patterns will only get you a small degree of difference in CTR.   Once you’ve figured out a winning creative pattern, alter this slowly to keep it refreshed in the eyes of your audience.  For example, changing colors, backgrounds, small elements of the picture, animation, etc.

#3: Try a wide array of offers, and don’t judge by user costs.   We initially wanted to test between 3-4 offers for this campaign and we usually keep in mind the cost for users to convert so we can estimate conversion rates.   However, this time we ended up testing 5-6 offers and adding in two extremely expensive offers in comparison to the others that ended up with the highest EPC and conversion ratios.  It might sound stupid to explain now but most people don’t realize that higher cost offers usually have higher CPA’s which in turn, require less people to convert in order to be profitable!

These three lessons all harp on the same message that it’s not always what you think, it’s what the data shows.  Ruling out creatives early because of budget depletion, ruling out offers before testing because of user cost, and not using a wide variety of creative designs in your media buys will instantly put you at a disadvantage to getting your campaign profitable before you even sign the IO contract.   Let your data do the talking and not your gut!

A lot of people in Internet University have private messaged me asking how to make a quick landing page (without outsourcing or using a paid tool). Since many of you may wonder the same thing I decided to make this video available for all our readers. If you have Adobe Photoshop on your computer you can actually generate a fully functional landing page cut in HTML in 10 minutes. Check my video below:

Let me know if you have any questions!

The other night I was eating Chinese food (one of my favorites btw) and at the end enjoyed a fortune cookie (which for the record was invented in Los Angeles). My girlfriend and I both compared our fortunes as we commonly do. Mine read:

A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner!

OK I apologize that it’s somewhat corny, but I do want to talk about the meaning of this. We can relate this back to affiliate marketing (or any business really). You don’t become successful with affiliate marketing by creating winning campaign after winning campaign. You become successful with affiliate marketing by finding the winning campaign. The most successful affiliates (and business owners) are ones that learn through failure and going through obstacles.

Since starting Internet University I’ve began to learn a lot about why some people succeed and why some people don’t. Truth is, many people are their own worst enemy when trying to succeed in making money online. Remember my post: Why Do Most People Struggle Promoting CPA Offers? In that post I mentioned what ‘super’ affiliates did different than other affiliates. There are no ‘super’ powers, they simply enter a campaign with a completely different mindset. Rather than hoping to succeed at the first couple attempts, they’re willing to make hundreds of different various of campaigns to find the winning formula.

A lot of people (especially those just starting out) don’t understand why their first couple attempts aren’t successful. Just because they spent an hour setting up a campaign and it’s not successful they get frustrated and are ready to give up. But what then? Go back to your 9-5 job? If you’re ever going to be successful with affiliate marketing, making money online, or in any business you’re going to have to be willing to learn from your failures and overtake obstacles.

This is an extreme example, but none-the-less very relevant to the point I’m trying to make. The other night I watched the true story of Midget Molley (a drug lord from Atlantic City). Midget actually went to jail for six years before he was released and made it big time. While I don’t condone his business, I do admire his determination. He didn’t let the six years he spent behind bars get him down. He was released without any money, worked his butt off 24/7, and eventually was pulling in over a million dollars a month (some reports say as much as two and half million). If he would have used this determination in a legal/ethical business he would probably be a very successful businessman today.

I didn’t get to where I am today by ‘sailing on a smooth sea’. I’ve had my hopes, dreams, etc. crushed, I’ve had my heart broken, I’ve had set backs that would make people cringe. I’ve been screwed out of thousands of dollars. I could have simply of given up and taken the ’9-5 job’ but I know I wouldn’t be happy. It’s these set backs that have made me the type of businessman I am today and that will continue to develop my professional career.

Where are you in all of this? Are you giving up too easy? Are you accepting failure or are you battling obstacles?