Im sure many of you have been in my situation. Your out at a party, and someone says they are trying to earn online. And suddenly all your mates but-in and say that you are the king of “Internet Scams”. Happens to me all the time. Infact many of my friends just think i spend my days scamming old/fat/self-conscious people into Credit Reports and Acai Berry shakes rebill offers.
But its always refreshing to meet someone face to face and talk Internet/Affiliate marketing. If you read high profile blogs like Shoemoney, John Chow, Nickycakes, you will notice they all attend huge seminars (Or generally just meet ups) and there is good reason. Its always a breath of fresh air to be able to talk SEO/Affiliate strategies face to face over breakfast, rather then working out timezones on MSN or IRC.
Last week was just one of those chance encounters that i got to meet someone who had just started in the affiliate game 2 months ago. They weren’t really doing much, just learning. They told me they were still using Clickbank and just writing up articles. Cool i thought. To be honest, article writing is a great entry point for anyone. You can spend an hour writing a really amazing article, just to see it fail. But an hour writing an article is better then spending a couple of days optimising wordpress with your own domain etc just to see it plummet.
The next day we continued our conversation on MSN. This is where things just seemed to go, “O Shit“, for me.
I asked her for a link to some of her articles. Reading through them i was amazed at how good she was at writing. Like these weren’t $2 per hour articles that you buy off some poor kid trying to feed himself on rice. These were really good. Only problem was they were pointless. Sure they were good articles about her niche, but they weren’t targeted to any sort of keywords what so ever. She didnt even know what “keywords” were! (Doh).
She then continued to ask me, “So how do people actually find these articles”. My jaw hit the ground. It was like one of those moments were you just cannot believe what you just heard. I dont know what the hell she was thinking, but im thinking it was something like people just typing random urls into the bar and maybe someday they will land on her articles…
I talked to her throughout the day. And it became more and more apparent that she had absolutely no idea what she was doing. She had been grinding out articles for 2 months, and yet didnt even know how people were going to find them, Or really even why she was writing them. And dont get me wrong, this girl was not dumb or stupid or any of the above. The articles were well written, just the execution of the whole “affiliate marketing thingie” wasn’t the greatest.
So, Lesson learned. Practice (aka writing articles for 2 months straight), doesnt make perfect.
I have a friend who is an Internet marketer. He joking tells people that he “peddles get rich quick schemes” for a living.
Not true, but it breaks the ice at parties.