A second thing covered in the email was basically a schooling for those that have built BANS stores, or any niche site, with either no content or unrelated and non relevant content. Speaking of the model of affiliate marketing that only the committed will make money at, they said:

If you don’t truly know the model (the requirements of the model) how can you successfully develop sites to profit from it?

This has always been a shortfall for BANS.

It’s always been just a tool - some of you have loved it, some of you have outgrown it and some of you have abandoned it.

With no direction, the idea of the “quickest path to success” is the one that many followed which meant the rapid development of poorly chosen, poorly planned, poorly built, poorly marketed and poorly managed sites.

The result of that process is inevitable - regardless of platform.

If you can’t see that you’re wasting your time.

That’s what I’ve been saying for the last year and a half here at AffiliateConfession.com even though when starting out building my BANS sites I played into the build-a-ton of sites mentality. Now, there’s nothing wrong with building a ton of sites if, and only if, you can develop them properly. Unfortunately in many cases that isn’t what has happened with many who have purchased BANS. As mentioned in the email example above, many have looked towards the “quickest path to success” with BANS and it has turned out to be no path to success at all.

Which brings me to the third part of the email where the developers are announcing a new product they’re releasing soon that will teach people the number 1 way to make money online. In fact, that’s the name of their website and where the new product will be released from when it’s ready. The url is TheNumber1WaytoMakeMoneyOnline.com. There’s not much to see there right now, but you can download a free pdf file that covers what will be in the guide.

When the guide is released it’s only going to be $24.95 and although it’s probably more geared to beginners I’m still going to get it because there’s always something to learn and I trust the guys that developed BANS because I love the product and the developers have never been about hype so I know they’re new guide will not be about hype.

There’s such a need for a straightforward product like this because there’s so much wrong information available about how to make money online today. And there are so many people who need to hear once again that there’s no quick path to success. I probably need to hear it again as well and for only $24.95 I trust it will be a pretty inexpensive lesson.

When you come home from working for someone else it will probably take some time to get used to all the things you have to do working for yourself. You have to do everything from taking out the trash, to figuring how much money to spend on advertising to making management decisions to being the one and only IT person to cleaning up after the cat. The multitude of things that need to be done every day can be a bit overwhelming until you get into the stride of your new gig. Once you get into that stride though, you then begin to realize how fortunate you are to be able to earn a living from the comfort of your home (or drinking coffee at B&N where I am now).

It also takes some time after you start working at home before you get to the the point where you realize how restrictive the job environment really was. However, at the same time you realize that, you kind of get a shock to your system when it dawns on you that you may not be able to ever return to that previous lifestyle. Congratulations, you are now totally unemployable!

While growing into your work at home affiliate business you will experience many a roller coaster ride when one month you are doing great and the next month you’re trying to figure out how you can afford to start your next ppc campaign or even buy a cup of coffee at the local Starbucks or Barnes & Noble. Over the more than 4 years I’ve been working at home I’ve made from $600 per month to $10,000 per month and literally everything in between. I’ve had so may sources of income dry up and so many others come from out of nowhere, it’s completely unbelievable sometimes to even contemplate how that has actually happened.

But that’s the way most affiliate marketers experience their business and watching things happen like this makes you much more able to see opportunity and capitalize on those opps that can make a difference in your business. All the while this is happening though you always want to be working towards those things that will provide you much more stability than some flash in the pan trick that you learned in the latest ebook you paid way too much for.

The shock to your system when you realize you are no longer job material I mentioned earlier makes you all the more an entreprenuer. Eventually, what was once a challenge to figure out where your next source of income will come from becomes a mode of everyday thinking. Seeing a ppc campaign dry up or not earning as much from your latest BANS site as you thought you would is no longer a big deal because you’ve already figured out how to do the things that can earn you a nice income. It isn’t like starting over, it’s just continuing down the path of being an entreprenuer. No worries, you’ll figure something out.

Having the determination to work through those days and extended periods in your affiliate business when things aren’t going that well will develop your attitude from an, “OMG what am I going to do?” minset to a, “No biggie, I’ll figure somthin’ out” attitude.

Set your mind on working towards unemployment, because it really is a beautiful thing.

Besides product descriptions of at least 2 paragraphs for each and every one of your products pages you should treat your BANS store as an on going project and continue to add pages to it on a fairly regular basis. I changed my philosophy back several months ago as did many BANS users, because of sites getting deindexed, in that the general consensus had been to build as many stores as possible and add content as you could. Now, I wouldn’t recommend working on more that one or two BANS stores at a time until you can add at least 30 or 40 pages of content to each one along with appropriate descriptions for each page that features auctions. You also want to get 30 or 40 articles to start off with placed in article directories for those all important incoming links.

Now, don’t think you’re going to get away with picking up a few articles from an article site and throw them on your store along with nonsensical product descriptions and poof, you’re done with that store. I’ve never been one to advocate the easy way of affiliate marketing and anything other than serious treatment of your content by giving your niche audience the quality information they’re looking for just isn’t worth doing.

Once you have your 30 to 40 pages, the same amount of articles and relevant product descriptions, congratulations, you now have the beginnings of a BANS store. I’ve read on the Build A Niche Store forums that some people have put up 10 or 15 pages of content on their sites and now they can’t think of anything else to add to their site. If you can’t think of more than 10 pages of content to add to your BANS site then either you need to change your niche or, more than likely, you need to expand your thinking.

On my gold coins BANS site I currently have 78 pages of content in several sections such as alternative investments, buying gold coins, the financial bailout, gold bullion, rare gold coins and more. These are all subjects related to gold coins that will eventually draw in the kind of visitor that could possibly be interested in either collecting gold coins or investing in gold coins. It’s not really that hard coming up with stuff to write about related to your niche. Just go to Google News or Google Blog Search and search for the top keywords in your area of interest. You’re bound to find lots of ideas for content and articles for article marketing.

As you continue to build your BANS store, the more relevant, quality content you add, the more your site begins to look like quality site to the search engines and your visitors. As far as some of the other things you can do to get better rankings are remove auctions from your home page and start a blog on your BANS site. I’ve seen my site completely disappear for some top keywords in just a couple of days when turning on home page auctions and then have watched that totally reverse itself in the same amount of days when flipping the switch again. I don’t have a clue why this happens, but Google just doesn’t like to see BANS sites with auctions on the home page, so get rid of them.

Also, blogs normally only take a few days to appear in the search engines and the gold coins blog added to the BANS site, while it only has 8 posts, it is indexed and starting to get traffic. The blog covers some things related to gold coins and other economic news and gives me an outlet to rant about the current state of financial affairs in this country while giving people access to alternative investments in gold if they choose to do so.

Yes, building a quality BANS site is still a lot of work, but having a successful affiliate business is all about work and quality these days. There are certainly smart and easier ways of building your affiliate business and a BANS store, but there aren’t any short cuts to easy money any longer.

The trouble us budding artists had was that we knew what an apple, an orange, a wine bottle, and a human face looked like close up, but from 20 feet away we were trying to draw in the detail that we knew was there, but couldn’t actually see. When we all eventually realized to just paint what we saw, the entire process became much easier.

If you think about what you do in affiliate marketing and especially how you work your paid search campaigns, sometimes doing the stupid simple things, or at least being able to realize what they are, can make a huge difference in your business. Taking a step back and examining what you really see and how you really get conversions, what makes people buy, or fill out a lead form and ends up making you money can be an eye opening experience. It will probably turn out to be different than what you may have been led to believe or thought you had your head wrapped around.

For the longest time it was like I was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out this ppc thing and just about 4 or 5 months ago it really began to literally “click” for me. The conventional wisdom for years was to throw thousands of somewhat related keywords into a few different ad groups, see what converted and then trash the rest. The trouble with that philosophy was that you could have hundreds or thousands of words that end up getting 1 or 2 clicks each and you continue to hold onto them while they get 3, 4 and 5 clicks, waiting to see if one of them may convert while they up costing you lots of cash (especially in a competitive niche) and valuable time watching them. I now never, ever use more than one keyword in an AdGroup.

There are certainly lots of ways to make ppc work, but what started finally paying off for me was when I realized that there is an entire group of impulsive individuals just waiting to pounce and spend money on the hottest thing or get the latest bit of information that’s important to them especially when it’s recommended by someone else or has the force of the all powerful media behind it.

Up close it looks like ppc is a huge chore with all the market research, keyword research, tracking, quality score issues, bid prices, conversions and everything else that goes with it. The right in your face view of ppc marketing is fraught with details, but once you step back and take a look at the bigger picture the fundamentals are really quite simple. The basics are no more complicated than: find a source of lots of cheap traffic and send it to a relevant offer that converts.

Whatever you think of the media, when it comes to identifying hot trends, hot products and niches relevant to us affiliate marketers, they are absolutely your friend. If you keep an eye on the Drudge Report, the morning shows, the nightly news and the extended news programs like Dateline, 20/20, 60 Minutes and others and then regularly check Google Trends, Insights For Search, Yahoo Buzz and anything else that keeps track of hot topics, everything you need to get gobs and gobs of traffic is right there.

The more familiar you become with watching trends, the easier it becomes to identify topics that could possibly be a successful ppc campaign or other affiliate marketing venture for you. It is becoming much more frequent that I get up from watching one of these news programs right in the middle of it, start a ppc campaign and and end up making money 15 minutes later. And the great thing about these hot topic campaigns is that no one else is bidding in that space, plus if they don’t end up working, the cheap traffic doesn’t end up costing you much.

You’ll probably have to run several of these type of campaigns until you get the hang of it and figure out what makes people react and buy and more specifically what works for you and the way you target your ppc efforts. For some of you, this will probably be fairly easy if you are already in touch with trends, popular culture and the like. It was an initial effort for me because I tend to shy away from trendy subjects so it was hard to identify what was important and would eventually be profitable.

The bottom line though is not to over-complicate the process because even if you are remotely familiar with the news and general happenings you already are in touch enough to make your affiliate marketing and ppc efforts work much better. You may just have to refocus, take a step back, and learn how to paint what you see, not what you think you see.

These two concepts could be discussed separately in different posts, but I believe they are related, so this will be a long post as I try to mix up some stew here and mash things together.

Attitude

Doesn’t Google just piss you off? Don’t you just hate it when you’re crankin on a CPA offer and they change the lading page and your conversions are cut in half? Doesn’t eBay make you mad when your sales stats aren’t making any sense? And what about this Obama guy, either you think the right wing republicans are trying to tear him down or you think he may be the anti-christ and is destroying the country. Man, there’s enough wrong stuff affiliate marketing and in the larger frame of things that you could probably spend your entire life worrying about it.

Now that you’ve probably thought about some of that above and may be thinking, “Yea, right on man! Google really is the evil spawn of a vast conspiracy by eBay, Oprah and Obama to lobotomize the world and merge our consciousness with a machine”, none of that is going to earn you one penny. In fact, dwelling on excuses, negatives and minutiae will seriously hamper your ability to focus, will hurt your motivation and it takes valuable time away from your business.

It all boils down to controlling your attitude instead of letting it control you. Because of the ever changing landscape of affiliate marketing, this business can certainly give you enough to complain about and as long as your complaints are pointed in the right direction they can benefit you, but the problem is, most times they aren’t. Complaints properly focused can change the situation or at least make others aware of a legitimate issue that needs to be dealt with, but complaining just for the joy of flapping your gums only makes you a better complainer, not a person with a better attitude.

Think about that, do you really want to be better at complaining? World class complainers may be great at what they do, unfortunately, the pay isn’t that great.

The next time you run across something that really makes your blood boil, instead of dwelling on the issue and complaining to your spouse or writing one of those long ranting blog posts, immediately refocus your attention on your next task or larger project. If you are like most affiliate marketers, you should at least have a mental list, written is best, of the next 25 or so projects or ideas you’d like to work on. Don’t wait, when you feel like wasting time complaining, immediately get busy doing something on your list and focus the energy you’d be wasting complaining to a more useful endeavor.

The better you control your thinking, the more likely you will be able to adapt to changes and be able to think outside of the box, which of course is the next subject in this post…

Out Of The Box Thinking

Can you think of a single famous inventor, technological pioneer or great leader that didn’t think radically different than the status quo of their time? Probably not, because big change comes from big, and most importantly, different thinkers. Fortunately, affiliate marketing, though it is a different way than most people choose to make a living, doesn’t require the innovation of putting a man on the moon. But to reach greater and greater heights does require a mode of thinking that leads to a path most are either unwilling to take or don’t realize you can take.

Why doesn’t the average affiliate marketer make $300,000 per month? The simple answer is, is that they haven’t figured out a way to do it yet. It may come as a shock to you that in he whole scheme of things, affiliate marketing really isn’t that hard. Most of us in this business probably possess the pure marketing skills to be doing much better than we are already, but the fact is, we aren’t doing better. Why is that? It’s because we become comfortable with the systems we have in place or the training we’ve received because they are working at some level for us. Congratulations, you’ve learned how to follow directions.

Learning how to think outside the box involves learning how not to follow directions! The directions are in place to teach you the system only. Directions for putting together your computer desk allow you to build a nice desk, that’s it. They don’t tell you what kind of computer to buy, what kind of software to put in your computer or what to use the computer for.

I see this in PPC Coach where there’s a system and how to exercises in place to teach members the ins and outs of pay per click marketing. Every month there are more involved lessons and ideas on how to better your ppc efforts and some follow those directions to the letter. What some forget though is that there aren’t any rules that say you must continue to work the lessons on a monthly basis. They are simply guidelines to get you to think about ppc differently than you may have in the past and that’s exactly what they were for me. Expanding on the lesson learned in PPC Coach has helped me go on to earn thousands where I had previously lost hundreds.

Right now though I’m still in a box though. It’s a $10,000 per month box, but it’s still a box. Others think in a $30K, $50K or $100K per month box. They learned to see beyond the $10K per month box and expand their “what if” thinking to a whole new level. And that’s one of the secrets for us as affiliate marketers that will help us see beyond the normal, learning to always ask “what if”. What if I did this backwards? What if Google didn’t matter? What if you didn’t follow the rules (I’m not advocating black hat here)? What if offer xxxx was only paying half of what it is, how could you still make money with it. What if I offer legitimate stuff to customers instead of rip-off gimmicks with recurring monthly charges? What if I bid on concept keywords instead of specific keywords in my ppc marketing. What if Google Quality Score didn’t matter, and on and on. It’s good to sit down from time to time and make a list of “what if” scenarios and meditate on them for a bit to see what you come up with.

It’s also important to get outside of the realm of affiliate marketing on a regular basis to get your mind thinking in a different direction. Go to your favorite book store such as Barnes & Noble and read up on the economy, find out how finance and economics works, read about how designers developed the latest Ferrari, the challenges the latest software packages are helping 3d modelers overcome, what people are doing to make due when they lost their job and so on. A constant refreshing of your mind with new ideas will help you see beyond your current mode of thinking into an ever expanding box that someday will expand large enough to encompass your ultimate goals and desires, whatever they may be.

Using all their skills wisely, the average affiliate marketer will have an average business and make average money. Marketers that take those same skills and reverse engineer the rules by thinking out of the box with an attitude of finding solutions instead of complaining, will succeed wildly. Never forget that the rules are put it in place to tell you what you can’t do, they rarely, if ever, tell you what you can do. It’s up to you to put on your thinking cap and figure that out.

Ever since eBay made a similar change, I guess it was about a year and a half ago, Amazon became one of the only all inclusive affiliate programs that still allowed direct linking. By all inclusive, I mean that with Amazon there is hardly a product in the world you can’t get through them, thus giving affiliates in almost any niche the ability to direct link. Being able to direct link to Amazon via paid search left the possibilities wide open for anyone that knew ppc fairly well and wanted to make some easy money. No matter the product, model number, color, size, shape or whatever, you can get it at Amazon and affiliates could send customers directly to any page right from Google, Yahoo, MSN and other paid search platform. Unfortunately, that will no longer be allowed.

This is a serious bummer since I’d been doing this exact thing for the last several months earning a few hundred dollars in commissions on a monthly basis and had been planning to scale this up quite a bit. It’s not the end of the world since I’m learning to take everything in stride, it just seems to be the nature of the affiliate game. You have to learn how to constantly adapt in this business or you’ll find yourself out of work.

Update: I thought I’d add the content of the email below:

Dear Amazon Associate:

We’re writing to let you know about a change to the Amazon Associates Program. After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you’re not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs.

As of May 1, 2009, Associates will not be paid referral fees for paid search traffic. Also, in connection with this change, as of May 1, 2009, Amazon will no longer make data feeds available to Associates for the purpose of sending users to the Amazon websites in the US or Canada via paid search.

This change applies only to the Associates programs in North America. If you are conducting paid search activities in connection with one of Amazon’s Associates Programs outside of the US and Canada, please refer to the applicable country’s Associates Program Operating Agreement for relevant terms and conditions.

We appreciate your continued support and participation in this advertising Program. If you have questions or concerns, please write to us by using the Contact Us form available on Associates Central.

Sincerely,

The Amazon Associates Program

Now that direct linking to Amazon from paid search is gone at the end of the month, it just makes being an affiliate all the more interesting. Share your thoughts, especially if you are direct linking to Amazon.

The big difference this month came from promoting Clickbank and CPA offers through ppc marketing. I have to give the credit to PPC Coach for the pay per click skills and attending the first Dot Com Steak Out and talking with my buddy Kiley Lenstrom for an attitude adjustment. I don’t know what it was for sure about hanging out at the Dot Com Steak Out, but a switch just went off in my head after being around some serious money makers in this business. Really, your attitude makes a huge difference in how much you can make in affiliate marketing.

Total revenue produced in March came to $12,298.65 with expenses of $1,726.88 which made for a total net income of $10,571.77. Everything breaks down as follows:

Google Adsense - $1,479.20
Commission Junction - $418.35
EPN - eBay - $205.32
Meal Planner Ebook - $187.00
TripAdvisor - $113.26
Clickbank - $567.73
Neverblue
Market Leverage
& Azoogle
CPA Offers - $9,070.73
Amazon.com - $158.17
Other Affiliate Programs - $98.89

Total Revenue - $12,298.65

Total expenses - $1,726.88

Total Income - $10,571.77

I had no idea this month’s income would increase by over 7 times from February’s income and double my previous record for earnings, but that’s the beauty of affiliate marketing. One month you may think it’s over and the next you end up making enough to carry you for several months. It can happen anytime so don’t ever give up on your affiliate career. Keep working, keep trying new things and keep learning, because you never know when things will turn around.

No, this is not an April Fool’s joke.

Using techniques taught in the program and developing my own techniques from the training modules has helped me produce more than $21,500 in revenue (Of which about 70% has been profit) since becoming a member.

Before becoming a member of PPC Coach my successes with pay per click marketing were almost non-existent. Several years ago I was able to produce some leads for myself during a stint with an mlm company and then went on to continue to produce leads for a company providing leads to that same mlm business, but profit margins were very thin. However, most of what I’ve tried involving ppc has been on the losing side. PPC Coach completely turned that around.

PPC Coach consists of training videos, tools, a forum and monthly training modules that are only accessible on a consecutive basis so as not to get overwhelmed with your tasks. The first month gets you going on polls and shows you how to set up your landing pages, choose offers and most importantly explains how to get lots of traffic to your polls. I’m sure you’ve seen some of these polls such as IQ surveys, political surveys or others asking for your yes or no opinion on some such subject.

Without giving away any of the inside secrets, I can tell you that learning how to do these polls was the catalyst to much bigger and better things. The training modules and videos show you how to work various aspects of pay per click marketing such as how to write effective ads, look for traffic sources, structure your campaigns, find the best converting offers and lots of other things.

The forums at PPC Coach are also invaluable as well. There are forum members and regular posters who have made over $100,000 per month that are more than willing to offer their advice if you just can’t seem to get the hang of things or don’t understand something about one of the tools or just need advice on something you’re trying to figure out.

To get the full impact of PPC Coach, it is important to follow the directions “Coach”, as he is called, suggests. Coach highly recommends new students watch all the videos and spend several hours in the forums to get familiar with everything before they start out on their first ppc campaign. This is exactly what I did. I pretty much dumped everything I thought I knew about pay per click marketing and just followed the directions and absorbed everything for the first 3 weeks or so.

Taking in all that PPC Coach has to offer has helped me develop my own system by teaching me to think outside of the box. And that is critically important to succeeding in with your ppc efforts in today’s highly competitive marketplace. Most anything we as affiliates are going to be promoting, especially offers from CPA companies, is nearly saturated when it comes to the most obvious paid keywords. If you are going to compete and drive traffic to these offers via ppc, you have to be able to see around the most obvious paths and find words with very little competition.

Without the aid of PPC Coach I’d probably still be floundering around losing money with my paid search efforts.

The cost of PPC Coach is $49.99 CAN per month which comes out to about $42 US. PPC Coach isn’t for everybody, but if you are tired of losing money and are serious about getting your ppc marketing efforts off the ground, PPC Coach is the real deal.

You can sign up for PPC Coach here.

As an example, I’ve been working on a system that gives a better focus to my ppc marketing where I can just find a good traffic source, then find an offer, plug in a few keywords and there’s another campaign working. About one out of every six or seven of these campaigns really make any money. But the other day I had one that I just knew would work. If you’ve been in affiliate marketing for any length of time, you know those ideas I’m talking about, the ones you are sure will generate lots of income.

Well, I worked on this ppc campaign for several day and sent over 2,000 clicks to the merchant at 5 cents per click or less and didn’t get a single sale. I was shocked to say the least because in my mind, it was a near certainty this campaign would work. But it didn’t generate even one cent of revenue. However, the same day I decided to let this one go, in came a sale from an old site on air compressors I hadn’t touched in more than a year. My commission for doing nothing was $40.

This is bizarre because stuff like this happens more often than you would think. Having enough niches out there generating a trickle of traffic to each site brings in additional commissions from furniture sales, chandelier sales, home decor, fitness equipment, travel and more. Probably 3 or 4 times a year I get a check in the mail from ReserveBranson.com for between $30 and $50. It’s not a lot, but it’s really nice when you’ve forgotten about it and you’re not expecting it at all. We usually take that money and go out for a nice dinner or something and celebrate that we just got paid for doing nothing.

Of course, you do realize you’re not really getting paid for doing nothing, it just seems like that. Over the last 4 to 5 years I’ve built up enough sites in enough niches that these unexpected, make money for doing nothing sales and checks are showing up more frequently. If you keep persevering in your affiliate career, this will eventually happen to you as well and you’ll get a check in the mail someday you weren’t expecting at all.

No matter how much money I go on to make in affiliate marketing, it will always be a beautiful thing when an unexpected $35 check shows up in the mail.

In light of this, my wife and I have started growing our own food, composting, getting our finances in order (we’ve been doing that for years though), and generally working towards self sufficiency because we don’t want to have to depend on a system that is failing. That’s also why we have our own businesses, because we want to be in control of our income, time, vacations and lives as much as is possible. Self sufficiency in our income will come when my affiliate marketing earnings are enough to support the both of us.

With looming economic problems on the horizon, what can you do to make sure your affiliate business has the best chance of surviving? You know that being an affiliate marketer takes a lot of personal initiative, but that is even more important today. Being able to spot trends, figure out things for yourself and become innovative will be critically important with a radically changed economy. When people’s spending habits change, we as affiliate marketers will have to be able to figure out what they are buying and why they are buying it even more so than we do now.

The kind of products that will sell will be things that help people become self sufficient themselves, get out of debt, grow their own food, do something with the home they can’t afford to live in any more, work for themselves, stay secure and on and on. There will be a much greater opportunity in the near future in helping people solve their serious problems than there will be in putting products in front of them that give them pleasure and make life fun. Products of necessity will replace products of enjoyment.

Affiliate marketers that can’t think out of the box and in an innovative way, will be in a heap of trouble and those that expect to be held by the hand and led through every step of the money making process are in for a rude awakening. If you can’t innovate in your affiliate business, you very well may have to dig ditches or stand in a soup line.

I received a comment here on Affiliate Confession a few days ago where the individual was hoping I could lead them to an affiliate program featuring a web site that was already set up, that already had programs in place, that were making money and all they had to do was plug into the system. While it is understandable someone would want that kind of a system, anyone that has ever made a dollar on the net knows that just isn’t how affiliate marketing works. People that think they’re just going to plug into a system without having to do a heap of work and be innovative, may as well grab a number and take their place in the soup line.

Learning To Be Innovative

Even though tough times are coming and those that can’t adapt will suffer, you can learn to recognize opportunity, adapt sufficiently and innovate in your business. But, as anything else, it requires work. If you love to read, you’ll have no problem, if you don’t, then start. It is a good practice to consistently take time away from your computer and go to the library or Barnes & Noble and read something other than whatever niche you’re working in. At least once a week I’ll head to B&N and spend from 2 to 4 hours reading about technonogy, business, economics, franchising, business management, motivation, and anything from Seth Godin.

I want to know what new gadgets are coming to market and how the manufacturer is doing that, how businesses are run, what people are doing to innovate, how entrepreneurs come up with new ideas, why consumers buy the things they do, what new businesses are starting up, why companies succeed, why companies fail, what people did to overcome adversity and multiple other subjects. I’m not smart enough to come up with that much on my own, so I read about how other people have done it and then try to think like them.

But being innovative also involves taking risks. You have to see what works for you and what doesn’t. I spent a whole lot of money dabbling in the world of pay per click marketing without showing much profit before I found PPC Coach and completely turned that around. By watching all the videos and reading everything I could about how successful people at PPC Coach had made money I was able to almost immediately make a decent amount of cash and then come up with a system that’s working like a charm since I started it a couple of weeks ago.

Going through the lessons and reading the forums at PPC Coach taught me to see beyond the usual help files at Google Adwords and info on blogs and learn how to innovate and see what I hadn’t been able to see previously. But even then I didn’t just follow along and not try things on my own, I’ve taken the lessons and put them into practice to see what works and what doesn’t and then put together my own system. And that’s what’s going to be required in the coming months and years as the economy works itself out and we experience changes not seen in 70 or 80 years.

We are facing touch times no doubt, but it doesn’t mean the end of civilization just yet. Every affiliate marketer that succeeds in the coming collapse of the economy will have to be able to rely on innovative thinking and the initiative to implement their ideas.

Sorry to sound a little doomsday here, but I don’t want it to be said that I didn’t sound an alarm. Get prepared.