You’ve probably heard the famous line “coffee is for closers” from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. While I’m not into the whole high pressure sales vibe of the film, that line does ring true in many ways. How much time do we waste while there is still work to be done? It got me thinking how that relates to the self employed Internet marketer.

For our industry, Twitter is for closers. Not just Twitter but forums, blogs, Facebook etc… How much time do you spend a day on this stuff? 1-2 hours a day maybe? That might not sound like much but when you add it up, even an hour a day over a year is 365 hours. Given a standard 40 hour work week that 9.1 weeks of work. Think of all the projects that could be accomplished in 9 straight weeks of work. Whole businesses could be made in that time.

One of my biggest goals of the new year is efficient time management. I’m cutting out as much of these time-sinks as possible. No forums, minimal RSS, and Twitter – maybe 5-10 minutes a day to keep up with the news. How much time can you afford?

This year if you see me tweeting, you’ll know I’m “closing”.

I thought a good way to wrap up 2009 would be to look back at some of my favorite posts of the year.  Here are a few that I think are worth reading in case you missed them the first time around.   Stay tuned for some even better stuff in 2010.

• No secrets to affiliate marketing – This was kind of a ranting post, but I think it effectively conveyed the point.
  
• Using conversion funnels to increase profits – A simple yet still very powerful technique to optimize your campaigns.
  
• Create your own lead generation business – This post generated a very good discussion in the comment section.
  
• Facebook workplace targeting -  Another simple technique that many people implemented to make a lot of money.  One reader literally made thousands with this tip.
  
• Tracking phone leads with Google Voice – This helps solve a common need with local affiliate marketing.
  
• How to write a private affiliate agreement – Many people were asking me if I had a local affiliate contract I could share, so I wrote this post as a guide.
  
• Pick one vertical and run with it – A huge part of my current overall business strategy.
  
• Google content network basic strategy – A basic guide for those starting out on the content network.
  
• Pre-qualifying your clicks – A really important concept to all my campaigns online.

Happy new year and best of luck in 2010!

As the year comes to an end, it is a great time to reflect on the state of your business currently and going forward.  Here are some things I like to look at this time of year.

1. Review the past year.

In order to see where you are going, you have to know where you’ve been. Not looking back at what you have done is like running a campaign with no tracking or analytics – it doesn’t work that well.  That’s why reviewing the last year is so important to success.

I like to take a long look at the past year and consider what really happened. Where was I successful? What failed?  Where did I waste work time being unproductive?  What can I learn from all the mistakes made? Being able to honestly evaluate your past performance with a critical eye is very important to future success. But you have to be honest with yourself.  How much time did you spend reading forums or Twitter? Think of all the new campaigns you could have tried with all that time over the year….  Don’t beat yourself up over mistakes, just use them to renew your focus going forward.

2.  Set new goals.

Goal planning should really be an ongoing task, but the end of the year is a great time to set new new priorities.  I have a giant full wall sized white board that was absolutely crammed with writing.   I had to admit to myself that some of the tasks were never going to get done.  I took a picture of the board so I had an archived record of everything, but then I wiped the whole thing clean!  I added some things back that were really important, but a most of it has been filled with new brainstorming.  I forced myself to spend long chunks of time just brainstorming and writing down new ideas.   There are some bold new directions that came about during those long sessions.    I now have a basic roadmap set for all of 2010.

3. Tax Strategies.

You hear about people going out a buying a lot of things for the business to generate write offs before the end of the tax year.  Unless you really need the items, this is flawed logic.  You shouldn’t spend money just to get a 35% tax break, when you are still out the other 65% for the purchase price.  Do meet with your accountant to plan some tax moves that make sense for your type of business.  There are some expenseable things that are expiring at the end of this year that you would need to buy now to take advantage of.  Deferring income until next year is always a good idea if you can.  But, your accountant is the best source of this information so don’t forget to meet or talk with them in December.

4.  Time off

Most important of all I believe is taking time off to spend with family and friends.  You’ve worked hard all year and you deserve a break before hitting it hard in January.  Enjoy any time that you can spend with your family, even if that means working less and leaving some money on the table.   You will never get to the end of you life and say you wish you would have worked more.   Time spent with loved ones and doing things you enjoy is what its all about.

I recently did a short interview over at the blog Emonetized.   They have been running an interesting interview series this month with different affiliates, so I decided to participate.

If you would like to read what I said, please go here

To be honest, I don’t read many blogs or forums about affiliate marketing.  The reason?  Aside from not having the spare time, most of what you read is simply wrong.  Everyone has an opinion, but unfortunately their opinions are probably based on circumstances that don’t apply to you.

Here are some examples of things I have read, that are just plain wrong.

• x traffic source sucks, no conversions.  Insert whatever traffic source you want here, and someone is out there saying it is terrible and doesn’t work.  While it is terrible for some, another person is making a killing with it at the same time.  The truth is many do work for certain cases, and you never know until you test for yourself.

• X niche is dead. Again, insert whatever niche you want here and there are people saying its too crowded, not crowded enough, not converting anymore.  The truth is, its probably working great for some people.

• You have to push rebills to make money in this industry. False. I don’t do any rebills and know plenty of other people doing really well that have nothing to do with rebilled offers.  Rebills are only a tiny fraction of the available offers.   There is a whole universe of offers out their besides the “hot” offers.

• You can’t do lead gen on facebook and social sites.  I actually saw someone stating this argument as a fact.  The fact is, when done right, social networks work extremely well for lead gen campaigns.  Whether that be local, regional, or national campaigns.

The bottom line is, you just can’t make generalizations about making money online because they don’t hold up.  The only constant I have found in the years spent doing this is:

Do research, pick a niche, set up some campaigns, test, track, optimize, test new traffic sources and repeat.

So don’t believe everything you read or hear.  Don’t even believe me   Just keep your head down and keep working.  You will succeed eventually.

Lead scrubbing is an important step to maintain the integrity of any offer or lead generation campaign.  It basically just means removing leads or sales that contain bogus, inaccurate, or incorrect information.  These leads are useless and kill the ROI for any campaign. There seems to be a lot of confusion over lead scrubbing.  Some affiliates think that it involves a network stealing leads from them after they have been reported,  but that is usually called lead shaving.  Lead scrubbing is a necessary step to make sure all leads or sales going to the advertiser or client are valid.   Without valid leads the advertisers doesn’t make money and closes the offer, and everyone loses.

Typical scrub rates vary for certain industries.  Mortgage leads usually average about a 15% scrub rate, while certain free offers can run 50% or more. Everyone wants to keep scrubbed lead rates as low as possible.  So how can you reduce the percent of leads scrubbed?

From the perspective of the affiliate:

Much of the lead scrubbing is done on the actual offer page, which is out of the hands of the affiliate.  But there are several things you can control to affect scrub rates of your traffic.

1.  Pre-qualifying your clicks is very important to weed out random clicks.

2.  Accurate demographic targeting is another.  By closely matching the  demographic of the person to the offer, you increase the chances of valid information.

3.  Correct GEO targeting.  If you send traffic from outside the accepted geographic area, the leads will be scrubbed.

4.  Using quality traffic sources.   Pay per click traffic will always yield lower scrub rates than un-targeted display traffic.

From the perspective of the advertiser or local lead gen:

If you are running a local lead gen or private affiliate offer, you want scrub rates as low as possible since you are paying for each lost lead.

Form validation is your first line of defence against bad leads.  There are 2 basic methods of form validation: client side (Javascript) and server side (PHP).  I prefer to use a mix of both.  The key is to validate every field as much as possible to not leave anything to chance for the user.  Check for blank fields, invalid entries, phone numbers, credit cards, invalid email addresses, URLs, invalid field lengths, numbers only, etc.  Basically you need to think of every possible way someone could mess up a form and get them to enter it correctly before they hit submit.   Proper form validation can make the difference between a successful offer and and failure.  It really is that important.   If you are running your own lead gen campaign, you also need to look at your traffic sources, as discussed above, to reduce scrub rates.

You can never get rid of scrubbed leads completely, but by setting up the forms correctly and sending quality traffic, you can greatly decrease scrub rates.

Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas is only 3 months away. This is the best Internet Marketing conference of them all. If you only go to one show per year, I would suggest choosing Affiliate Summit West.

You can use this exclusive code to get 10% off any registration: ASW10CDF10

Sign up early, because this show usually sells out. I’m looking forward to meeting everyone there.   I may even do some kind of informal meetup for readers of this blog.  (more on that later)

I also found this tip on twitter, where people are scoring rooms at the RIO for around $50/nite, instead of the standard $170/nite rate.

10% off registration, super cheap room: now you have no excuses!

I’ve been talking about local lead generation for a while now and the topic always generates a lot of interest. One of the best decisions I ever made for my company was moving away from CPA network based offers and creating my own direct offers with businesses. I was doing pretty well on various networks, but local lead generation took it to the next level.

Local lead generation can be great, but the biggest problem is that local can mean small markets and limited profits.  What really kicked my company into high gear was what I call direct lead generation. This is basically local lead gen on a national level.   To do this, we seek out companies that have a large regional or national footprint to partner with on private affiliate offers.   This allows the company to have a much larger advertising/marketing budget than a local mom and pop type business.

The ideal company to find would be a smaller national company with a limited online presence and no affiliate marketing program.  There are actually still a lot of companies like this out there.   Most of the time they are new to the whole performance based advertising concept.  It could be product based CPS, CPA, or straight lead gen, depending on the company.   You approach them just as you would a local business, but just on a larger scale.  It’s best to have proven case studies and a solid track record before approaching a large company.   They tend to go for hard data, not promises and hype.

Here’s a tip:  If you aren’t good at sales or just don’t like it (me), consider hiring a sales person to contact companies that you have targeted.   If you outsource design, coding, accounting etc, why not contract a sales guy?   A good sales person can be a huge asset to your business.  All you need is that one large account to take off.

There are obvious benefits to having an exclusive affiliate contract with a national company:  large budgets, national advertising reach for targeting, big volume, total freedom of advertising, etc.  The downside is that they are hard to find and take a lot of up front legwork to get established.    Up front work that you are not getting paid for…

But the rewards can far outweigh the risks and time investment.

So if you ready to take local lead gen to the next level, think national and go after some big fish!