www.affiliateconfession.com

Yesterday I covered a little bit about how my wife and I persevered through the beginning of our MLM days in EcoQuest International. Today I’m going to cover how even when you get going, you still may be facing a bumpy ride. This will probably relate more closely with affiliate marketers and bloggers since getting started with a blog is fairly easy, but trying to make money once you get going may be a bit more difficult.

Once our network marketing business started to get going, things were pretty smooth for a while. We were getting close to what was called a Manager position which meant you had to have roughly $30,000 worth of air purifier sales go directly through you three months in a row. We made this happen 2 months in a row and then things got weird. EcoQuest headquarters found out I was generating my own recruiting and air purifier leads via one of my websites and they didn’t want anyone using their company name or images of their products on personal websites.

Of course, this is one of the basic things that is wrong with MLM. You supposedly own your own business, but you can’t advertise as you please and can’t actually use the company name in any of your advertising. So essentially you don’t own your business. This was a hard lesson for me to learn, but the value in all of it was that I had started to figure out how to generate traffic and do a little SEO in the process. After I removed the EcoQuest company name and pictures from my sites, the number of leads plummeted.

On top of all that, a friend who I was in business with, purchased some email leads from an unknown spammer on eBay for me. I used them and my autoresponder company banned me from using their service due to spam complaints and deleted all my legitimate email addresses in the process. Needless to say, I didn’t make the Manager qualification I had hope for and missed out on a significant percentage increase in bonus check income. However, we stuck it out and eventually qualified for the Manager position almost exactly 1 year later.

During that year I had learned more about internet marketing and PPC advertising and was able to produce my own retail leads without being in violation of any EcoQuest guidelines. We also got in with a group of people who were running an expensive, but profitable radio advertising campaign so things were looking fairly good for some time. I had also quit my job (the best paying job I had ever had) as a graphic artist with the Yellow Pages to work my EcoQuest business full time.

Things went pretty well in EcoQuest for a few months and we were making some good money, but our advertising expenses were very high. The radio advertising campaign was costing us over $1,000 per week and my ppc costs were about $500 per month. We were spending a total of around $4,500 per month on advertising. But there was a bigger issue, I was spending a huge amount of time helping retail customers fix or troubleshoot their air purifiers, ordering parts and shipping them to customers and even replacing machines on occasion.

The final straw with my mlm adventure in EcoQuest came when after returning from a drive to Maine for Christmas of 2004 we had a total of 8 phone messages or emails regarding quality issues with the air purifiers. To top it off I had to fight with EcoQuest customer service to get them to replace a couple of machines. I had been working at home around 8 months when we decided it was time to move on and leave the EcoQuest business. I could no longer in good conscience sell these air purifiers that were not top quality products, nor did I have the time to deal with 2 to 3 angry customers per week.

Fortunately because of what I had learned about internet marketing and because we had started a couple of websites that were making some decent money from Google Adsense we didn’t take too much of a hit on our income. We had also made a nice real estate investment back when things were still doing well and we made a nice chunk of change from that.

The lesson in all this is that it it so important to diversify and not let your income be generated from only one source. We didn’t rely completely on EcoQuest income to keep us going and internet marketers shouldn’t rely on one advertising source such as Adsense, or one affiliate program or even one single niche to generate their income. What is profitable and popular today may not be 6 months or a year from now.

In part 3 I will go over our ups and downs with Adsense, more PPC advertising and various affiliate ventures. Throught it all we stuck in there and rode the roller coaster. I’m hoping this year will be a much less bumpy ride.

I hope you are having a productive New Year so far. Stay tuned for more…

Alan

Tags: ecoquest international, internet marketing, mlm, air purifiers, ppc advertising

If you are going to work at home, build a business on the internet or are just looking for something to do to earn some extra money there will be ups, downs and things that just don’t work out like you had planned. Many an internet marketer never gets past the point of their first disappointment because they either quit and resign themselves to a job or they move on to something else instead of tweaking and building on their mistakes.

My fist inkling of building a business and starting to work for myself was my second foray into the world of MLM. (I had been in Amway many years ago, but didn’t really have a clue about what I was doing or had gotten myself into.) While I certainly wouldn’t recommend network marketing to anyone today, many of you may have gotten your start in this type of business and may have learned some valuable lessons in the process like I did.

My wife and I were introduced to EcoQuest International and the idea of selling air purifiers back in late 2002. We thought the business had potential and were quite excited after attending our first of many business meetings. We were sure we were going to be rich in a couple of years. After investing around $3,800 in what was called a Success Kit (pure marketing on the name there) I was not going to let this venture fail. The way this business worked was that you would let potential customers try the air purifiers for 3 to 5 days and if they liked them, you had a sale. I was told these machines would sell themselves.

I proceeded to find out if this was true when the day after I ordered the $3,800 kit, I canvassed my neighborhood drumming up business by going door to door to get these 3 to 5 day trials. What I immediately found out was that even getting a placement was difficult. After establishing the company record of 18 placements before getting a sale I realized these air purifiers would not just “sell themselves.”

Most people would quit before the 5th or 6th rejection, but I determined I was at least going to earn back the $3,800 investment. There was no way I was going to lose money on this deal. In the process we had some very frustrating and rather comical things happen while initially getting started and trying to sell these machines. We placed 3 classified print ads our first month in the business and had a problem with all 3 ads. One ad was not printed at all, one was printed with a wrong phone number and the third was printed with no phone number. It probably took 6 weeks to eventually get the first ad placed correctly.

Another thing we tried was placing advertising boxes in restaurants offering a free meal for people to try a purifier in their home. We got a few trials out of this process, but never sold a machine despite being told how well this worked for other dealers. We had boxes stolen, lots of fake inquiries, boxes thrown away by business owners and we even had someone keep a machine for 3 weeks telling us they would eventually pay for it. We finally had to show up on their doorstep and demand they return the machine.

So you’re probably thinking we quit by this time right, wrong! We eventually sold all of our air purifiers and reordered several times. We also started to sponsor several people and eventually built a fairly substantial business. That of course, had its own challenges which I will cover tomorrow.

The point of this is that, like anything, you must decide you’re going to put serious effort into your business or don’t even bother getting started. While building my EcoQuest MLM business I sponsored people who never ordered anything, never called anyone, never sponsored anyone and never lifted a finger to build a business, yet they supposedly wanted to get rich, or work from home or be their own boss, blah, blah, blah.

I would not encourage anyone to do MLM at this point because of inherent built in flaws in most systems, but the point is this: If you aren’t willing to make at least this kind of effort in whatever you do to earn money online, don’t bother to get started. If I come to your 2 month old blog and you are only posting twice a week I know you aren’t serious. Please don’t quit your day job at Burger King.

Alan

Tags: perseverance, internet marketer, mlm, ecoquest international, blog

Like anyone always looking for an opportunity, real estate piqued my curiosity just a few years back. The Brevard County Florida market in 2004-2005 looked pretty good. People I knew were having spec homes built and turning around and selling them a year after closing for 20% to 25% more than the price they paid. Everyone was doing it.

We did it as well. In fact, our first spec home was purchased for $242,000 in June of 2004 and sold just 10 months later for $345,000. Our initial thought was, watch out Robert Kiyosaki we’re coming up behind. Fortunately we hit the crest of the wave for the boom real estate market in Florida and were riding pretty high after that deal. The home was completed in April of 2005, we signed our certificate of occupancy and had the buying offer 22 hours later. It couldn’t get any better than that.

Shortly after that we signed our next deal and purchased another home for nearly the same price, but considerably smaller. We didn’t expect to make quite as much from this home as the last, but would have been quite happy with $20K to $30K. Then on to the third deal we went, picking up a very nice home to flip for a purchase price of $300,000. We certainly thought this was the way to go in investing and were considering a rental cabin in North Georgia as another way to diversify our income.

Then things began to get weird. We were actively looking for a vacation cabin rental and had made an offer on one after spending an entire exhausting day looking at more cabins than I ever care to again. The weird thing was, no one ever told us if our offer was accepted (obviously we eventually figured out it wasn’t) and no one from the real estate company we spent the entire day with ever called us back, ever. Here we were, driving all that way from Central Florida to North Georgia to spend time looking for real estate, making an offer on a cabin and never receiving a call from the agent we met with. Most agents would salivate and kill for a lead like that. We took it as a sign.

A few months later with construction on our second spec home not even started, we took a look at our finances and opted to drop out of our third deal only 3 days before the actual closing. This was almost as smart a move as the decision to buy our first spec home.

The Florida Real Estate Market Tanks

The construction on our second investment home was excruciatingly slow and it was finally completed 13 months after closing. This was unfortunately right at the time the market began to slide into oblivion in Florida. So here we were, stuck with making full payments on a home that was worth less than we paid for it. Our hopes were raised when we received an offer just 30 days after it being on the market. They were later dashed when we found out the prospective buyer had no money and no job. Much of my adventures into affiliate marketing have been roller-coaster rides such as this.

This adventure turned out to be a year long ordeal of ups and downs, cutting back everywhere we could, praying for relief and shelling out what to us was a huge amount of money every month for nothing. Six months after closing we switched from a listing only company to work with a full service real estate agent and learned about short sales. A short sale is basically when the bank decides to take the price you can reasonably sell a house for in the present market rather than go into foreclosure.

After another 3 months or so of no action we then came up with a strategy to lower the price of the home $10,000 every 2 to 3 weeks until it sold. To make a much too long story short, the house eventually sold for $180,000 in a short sale. To remind you, we purchased the house two years earlier for $242,000.

What Did I Learn?

This was a very hard lesson. My wife and I were not in enthusiastic agreement on this investment and I did not give that adequate weight when deciding to go ahead with it. You never know how things are going to turn out, but it makes life a lot happier when you can agree with your spouse on such a huge decision. That is the big lesson here guys.

This was also a lesson is perseverance. I had to have my nose to the grindstone every day to keep from having to go back to a thing call a job. It was a serious consideration to supplement our income with my previous career as a graphic artist. Thankfully that never had to happen because the house sold about 3 months ago. It sold in the nick of time because we couldn’t afford to make one more payment on it.

Thankfully in a short sale the bank takes what it can get from the sale and the deal is over. However, we still had 1 years worth of interest payments and 1 years worth of full mortgage payments completely down the drain.

What do you do when you watch $30,000 disappear like that? Move on, that’s all you can do. It’s sort of like watching a once profitable website completely lose rankings and listings in Google. You just keep building, keep adding pages, keep tweaking and keep working until it turns around. That’s why it’s important to diversify your online income as well. I love the eBay affiliate program and it is my biggest money maker now, but it’s not the only game in town and I never want to make it that way.

Spread out your income, diversify your affiliate programs and listen to your wife on important decisions. Need I say more?

Alan

Tags: real estate, investment, foreclosure, short sale, lessons learned

Have you though about the time when you realized the internet could be a source of income? What kind of feelings did that bring about? Did someone introduce you to the concept of affiliate marketing or did you just happen to run across it one day and think, ‘Hey, I could make money online too!’

I think I got my first email address and signed up with Prodigy some time in 1992, but I didn’t get access to the internet until late 1994 or early 1995. And it was probably several months later that I realized people were making money online and I started thinking about that possibility myself. I told my wife, who at the time refused to use the internet, thinking it was just some fad, “Jean, you need to get familiar with this internet thing, it could be big someday.” Naturally I didn’t have a clue how people were making money, much less how I would do it myself.

It was several years however, before we got our first domain name and started heading in the internet cash flow direction. We purchased ChristianDiscipleship.comin October of 2000 thinking that we wanted to write an online Christian magazine and possibly sell some of my artwork and photography online. We weren’t really thinking in the right direction about how to make money, but at least this got us started and trying different things. We found out it is extremely hard to sell art and photography on the net. Many people like to look at your work, but they don’t buy your work. I first discovered Adwords in 2001 or 2002 and ended up losing some money getting people to look at my art and greeting cards, but no one bought anything. We did manage to sell a few posters and cards at our local flea market, but making a living online was not even in the realm of possibilities at the time.

I think we eventually sold a couple of cards from the site and I sold some old drum equipment on eBay after buying a new drum set and our online money making day had just began. But it wasn’t until late in 2004 that everything came together and we started earning about $800 to $1,000 per month mostly from Adsense from a vacation rentals website.

Through all that I wish I would have had my brain screwed on a little tighter because it would have been nice to have gone through the heyday’s of affiliate marketing when all it consisted of was throwing up a website, putting affiliate banners all over it and making tons of cash. Back before the dot com bust you could have a site that was a mishmash of subjects and still rank high for very diverse subjects on the same site. If you had decent writing skills and could get a page on the net in those days you could make serious coinage.

The downside of that was that there were people making $50k or $60k per month who’s income dropped to $4K or $5K nearly overnight when search engines (mostly Google) started taking a more serious look at search relevancy and started punishing people for basically misrepresenting what they really had on their sites vs what their meta keywords and descriptions said they had. Maybe it was a good thing I wasn’t making $50K per month because I might have been living a $49K per month lifestyle and we would have been in serious trouble.

So there’s the beginning of the journey. We really took way to long to get the whole thing going. We really started making some decent cash in mid 2004 with a home business site I had started and the more so with the vacation site in early 2005. But that’s just the beginning of the story.

So when did you first realize you could make money on the net and how long was it before you started to take action?

Alan

Tags: internet business, affiliate marketing, ebay, vaction rentals, prodigy