It’s been year and a half since I’ve published a post here. I always talk about “how important it is to take action“.

But in most cases, taking action is not enough. Consistency & persistency are two extremely important factors for success.

Since my last post, I’ve attempted to write a new post for so many times. I’ve left some of them as draft, and simply deleted the rest.

What was it from taking me writing a new blog post?

Writer’s block?

Lack of interest?

or many more other excuses…

While I was thinking about these reasons and trying to find an excuse for not updating my blog, a great post by Seth Godin came to rescue and answered all the questions in my mind.

I wasn’t updating my blog, because I was afraid of SHIPPING.

Most of the posts I’ve written wasn’t good enough for me to publish (I’m the toughest critique of myself). Sometimes, it just didn’t feel right after I’d complete writing a post. In some cases, I thought the post was too long, and never took the time to work on it.

Seth Godin’s workbook on Amazon – The ShipIt Journal

From now on, I will be SHIPPING it…

I won’t care if a post I’ve written is too short or too long.

I will hit publish before reading it through 10 times.

I won’t be mad at myself when I find out several misspelled words after publishing a post.

Whether it’s a website you’ve been planning to launch, or a project you wish you’ve completed long time ago, or even your personal blog you’ve been thinking about updating for a long time, it’s time to ship.

Forget about getting the perfect product out of the door. Simply ship what you have.

It’s time to ship & thanks to Seth Godin for reminding it to us…

Everybody wants to start their internet business and make money online.

It sounds magical, having a website, and making money while even sleeping, right?

This is what all the internet marketing gurus tell us. They show us the pictures from a nice beach, having a beer while working on a laptop. They tell us how easy it is to make money online.

So called gurus are good at what they do, and they know how to create the dream job before selling it to us.

Since their job is to sell you the dream and make money out of it, they will never tell you a little secret about internet marketing.

Internet Marketing is BORING as Hell

Yes, you’ve heard it right. I’m telling you the truth; internet marketing is one of the most boring things you can do for living.

How come? Don’t I always tell you that I love internet marketing. I really enjoy what I do?

Yes, but let’s talk about reality for a minute.

Overall, probably 1% of internet marketing is fun, creative and enjoyable. It is the part when you need to use your right brain.

How about the rest 99%?

It’s data entry & so many repetitive tasks, all the left brain stuff you need to do to be able to succeed.

This is where most beginners fail.

Most beginners fail because they believe in the dreams sold by so called gurus, and their expectations are sky high.

They all want to work less, make more money, and do it fast…

If you are a beginner in internet marketing, forget about all the dreams sold by gurus.

Start fresh, and get ready to countless hours of work, mostly boring, data entry type work.

How About Automation & Scaling?

Unless you excel in doing all the tasks by yourself, you will never be able to automate & scale by hiring other people.

Automation and scaling is an art in itself, and most gurus make it sound like child’s play, in reality, it is not.

If you can make $10/day with what you do, it won’t be a piece of cake to do the same thing 1000 times, and make $10,000/day. Trust me on this.

You Have Killed My Dreams, What Am I Gonna Do Next?

If you are serious about making money online, start with setting your expectations low. Forget about all the hype you’ve thought by so called gurus.

Get ready to work hard, I mean really hard.

Learn every single task, and start creating a system by using your right brain. Always think about how you can automate the task you are working on.

Next time your neighborhood’s friendly guru tells you “it’s so much fun & easy to make money online”, you know the truth & you can tell him “yeah, right”.

Spring is here, and the weather in New York is gorgeous. After a long, and freezing winter, this weather is exactly what we have been waiting for.

All the streets are packed with people, walking around, shopping, trying to get the best out of this wonderful weather.

And I’m at my wonderful midtown office, writing this blog post on a lovely Sunday afternoon. What is wrong with me?

Entrepreneur BS

Ok, here’s the deal, I won’t bore you with a long blog post, instead I’ll simply cut to the chase.

Most of the entrepreneurs I meet are great at talk, motivation, and all the blah blah. They talk about how luck is so important, how they have tried that, thought about this and that, etc.

I can comfortably say that 9 out of 10 entrepreneurs or self-employed people I’ve met till day have all one missing ingredient in common, and it is hard work.

Feel free to lie to everybody about how hard you work, how dedicated you are, etc.

When you go to bed, and put your head on your pillow, ask this question to yourself, and be honest;

Do I work hard enough?

You can lie to anybody else, but not to yourself.

Please, ask this to yourself tonight and be honest.

Optimization is a key factor in success for internet marketing campaigns. There are so many variables needed to be tested until a campaign is fully tested & optimized.

One of these variables is frequency capping or also called as individual user capping.

If you are new to media buying, or CPV Marketing, you have to understand the frequency cap concept before setting up your first campaign.

What is a Frequency Cap or Individual User Cap?

Frequency cap or individual user cap is the number of times a unique visitor sees your ads within a given time. For CPM ads, when time period is not specified, the default time period is 24 hours.

In plain English, if frequency cap for a campaign is 2, it means a unique visitor will only see your ad maximum of 2 times within 24 hour period.

Why Do You Need to Set a Frequency Cap?

• Some sites have autorefresh javascript within their code. When you visit these types of sites, every X seconds, the site refreshes itself, by counting each refresh as an extra impression, and charging the CPM advertisers. So, a visitor might leave a page open, leave the computer and come back several hours later. Meanwhile, your ad can be shown to the same user thousands of times, by wasting your advertising budget.
• If a site is getting more than average page views per user numbers, you have to be careful. Forums, social sites, user generated content sites usually fit in this category.

Setting Individual User Cap for CPV/PPV Campaigns

Deciding on individual user caps for CPV campaigns is little different than CPM campaigns. You have to think about cookie length, audience target size (super targeted, or not, etc.), and start by testing.

Every PPV traffic company has its own settings. Below is a screenshot from Trafficvance. It’s pretty self-explanatory.

On CPV campaigns, I usually start with the default settings (1 view per 12 hours), and keep testing it. Some campaigns on CPV tend to lose its profitability after a while, and this is when you start playing with the individual user cap, and find the optimum settings by testing.

Branding or Performance Campaign

If your campaign’s goal is branding, you might want to be more flexible with frequency capping. Even if a visitor sees your banner several times a day, and you are charged for it, it might be worth. At the end, you’d like to promote the brand, and show them the ad as much as possible.

Some branding campaigns don’t even set frequency caps, and that’s also fine.

But if you are running a performance based campaign, you have to take frequency capping seriously, and test until you find the most optimized level for your campaign.

Frequency capping might easily turn a losing campaign into a profitable one. So, make sure you work on it before your next CPM or CPV campaign.

I have met a number of people who are new to making money online since I’ve been in this business.

Most of the people who are new to internet marketing world are good at tons of skills such as being smart, doing extensive research, following trend setters, learning new things daily, etc. But, most of them have one thing in common: Being afraid of taking action.

Being afraid of taking action is like cancer. If you can diagnose the problem, understand the reasons for it, and start treating it, you might be successful. But if you spend months, even years with being afraid, it might be too late to take action on.

Why am I Afraid to Take Action?

Ask this question to yourself, be honest, and come up with your reason(s).

Do you spend countless of hours reading about a topic (e.g. google adwords), feel like you know everything about the topic, but don’t know how to launch your first campaign?

Do you lack of knowhow due to insufficient research & study?

Are you scared to take action because you don’t have the luxury of spending any money online?

Take a piece of paper, and write down: “Reason(s) Stopping me to Take Action:”

Ask every possible question you can think of to find out the reason(s) of being scared to take action, and write it/them down on the paper.

Solve the Problem

In the first step, if you were honest to yourself, you should have a piece of paper with the reason(s) that stop you from taking action with a title of “Reason(s) Stopping me to Take Action:“, correct?

Now, cross out the word Reason(s) and write down Excuse(s) instead.

There is absolutely NO reason to stop you from at least trying. All the reasons you’ve come up are your own excuses.

Take Action Today

Whatever the excuse you have, there’s a solution out there. Most of the solutions are in your mind. You should start with changing your mindset, and get ready to make money online.

Don’t ever be scared of failing in internet marketing, but always remember to take bearable risks for your situation, such as not risking your retirement fund.

Your success in internet marketing depends on your actions, so don’t wait another day, and take action today!

Also, check out this post I’ve written about 5 Reasons You Fail To Make Money Online to get you started with some ideas.

I’ve written about affiliate networks that don’t treat affiliates as customers yesterday.

In this post, I will write about a related topic and a problem in the affiliate industry; new affiliates being rejected by networks.

I have been rejected by a few affiliate networks in the past without any clear reason. I’ve had some stupid affiliate networks calling me and asking me so many questions before accepting me.

Oh, come on !!! I’m taking my valuable time to sign up with your network, and you either reject me or make me feel UNWELCOMED to your network. What is wrong with you?

Ok, here’s an absurd one; I’ve met the owner of this affiliate network (I won’t name it, but a pretty popular one in the industry) at Affiliate Summit last year. He was a great guy, and we’ve brainstormed during the summit, and hang out at a few clubs. I come back to my office after the summit and complete the application to sign up with the network, and I get a rejection email within a few hours

I then call them to explain that their CEO asked me to join, probably new, and smartass employee on the phone tells me that they don’t accept international affiliates. Since the blog URL I’ve entered was registered on my brother’s name (who was living in Europe at that time), he assumes I’m an international affiliate without checking my NYC company name, tax ID, and address. Very well done.

I felt sorry for the CEO first, then decided that it’s his fault, because he hasn’t put together proper instructions for his employees about accepting/rejecting new affiliates.

I’ve heard so many stupid/funny stories of affiliates being rejected by networks.

Affiliate networks, please listen up: Rejecting new affiliates without a proper reason is like having a retail store on a prime real estate, and having a totally clueless guy at the door to screen potential customers and making a decision about “who gets in”.

You have to understand that you are a retail store, not the most popular club in town.

Since I’ve mentioned international affiliates, let’s also talk little bit more about them.

Are All International Affiliates Scams?

Most affiliate networks simply reject international affiliates without a reason. They have made their minds up about international affiliates. Affiliate networks need to understand these about international affiliates:

• All international affiliates are not scams. I’ve met so many smart, well educated international affiliates making 7-8 figures a year with affiliate marketing.
• International affiliates also promote US offers. Most networks think international affiliates are capable of promoting only international offers. It’s 2010, and every English speaking person can promote US offers regardless of where they live.

Just because you don’t have the competency to manage international affiliates as a network, you shouldn’t assume that all international affiliates are scams.

How to Treat New Affiliates Right – AzoogleAds Story

I kept talking negative about affiliate networks both yesterday and today. I want new affiliates realize that there are also great networks in the industry. As my readers already know, I don’t name companies on my blog a lot, especially when I have a negative opinion about them.

I wanted to share this short story about AzoogleAds to show the other side to new affiliates, and make an example to other networks that don’t treat new affiliates the right way.

It was a few years ago, a monday, around 4am in the morning when I signed up with AzoogleAds, and it was my first CPA network signup. I didn’t have any expectations, and I was only planning to check out the offers. Even though I had pretty good knowhow about affiliate world, I was so busy running my ecommerce company and wasn’t ready to start promoting offers.

Anyways, I get a phone call from Azoogle about 9.15am same day. After talking about what I’ve been up to for a few minutes, the affiliate manager on the phone invited me to lunch to meet them since we were both in NYC. Keep in mind, I’ve clearly told him that I’m not planning to promote anything heavily. I’ve also made it very clear that I was a total newbie to affiliate marketing even though I was making money online since 1996. So, he knew that I wasn’t a big fish before inviting me to lunch, and then their office.

Long story short, Azoogle has treated me so well since the first day as a customer, I always check if they have a similar offer I’m planning to run before any campaign.

This is my affiliate link if you like to join Azoogle, and let me know if you need any help or point of contact at AzoogleAds.

Have you ever been rejected by an affiliate network? Did they have a reason for rejecting you? I’d love to hear your story. Please share it on the comments below.

I had this post in my drafts waiting to be completed for a while.

I’ve decided to complete & publish it after reading Ad Hustler’s post Get Out of My Affiliate Network yesterday. I can’t agree more with Ad Hustler.

I also have a few ideas of my own to add to the discussion.

Couple of weeks ago, I was at NYC Meetup202 where a few guys approached me to promote their exclusive affiliate networks. When I’ve asked them the question “What is exclusive about your network?”, the answers were similar, such as “our customer service, highest payouts, etc.” Ad Hustler says “There seems to be this new trend going around where affiliate networks want to be exclusive.” about this.

I’ve been hearing about more affiliates being rejected & kicked out by affiliate networks, and more & more exclusive & private affiliate networks showing up in the performance marketing space.

Ok, here’s the deal; I have no problem with somebody starting a private affiliate network, and accepting only a few top players in the affiliate circle or even only friends. But, affiliate network owners, and people who are planning to launch their networks need to understand one thing clearly:

Affiliates are the Customers

All affiliate networks need to understand that they are nothing without affiliates. Most affiliate networks make the mistake of believing that merchants are the customers. But it’s better to start treating affiliates as customers also.

Just like a real estate agent being the middle man between landlords and potential customers, affiliate networks cannot generate business without either side.

After understanding this argument, and treating affiliates as real customers, networks will only gain value from it.

I’ll keep writing more about the topic. “Rejecting new affiliates” & “kicking affiliates from networks” posts, coming soon.

Meanwhile, if you are an affiliate network owner and didn’t treat affiliate marketers as your customers till now, start working on it by reading CRM 101.

I also want to mention that, there are few affiliate networks who have welcomed us since day one, and treated us as real customers. That’s the reason I’m a loyal customer of these networks, and I check their offers first before starting a new campaign. This post was for bad apples, not for all networks.

Since PPV affiliate marketing has been pretty popular lately, and many beginners are testing the waters, I wanted to share a tip I personally use to make money with my PPV campaigns.

Showing is better than telling. So, here’s the screencast I’ve created to show you the exact URL research method I use to target local websites, and sell national offers.

In the video below, I’m using 2 tools to do my url research. The first one is AffPortal, which is a must have tool to have if you want to make money in the PPV field, and the second tool is a free desktop tool called Laser URL by Matt Harward.

PPV Local URL Research Screencast

P.S. 10 year old would do a better job with video editing than me, I accept it.

P.S. 2) This is a fairly easy tip to get you started with lateral thinking. Whether you’re an experienced internet marketer or just starting, tips like these might help to start thinking outside the box.

P.S. 3) If you are new to PPV Affiliate Marketing, start with reading my post; PPV Affiliate Guide.

P.S. 4) Tools used in my screencast are AffPortal & Laser URL.

If you are in internet marketing as a business, you should already know that diversifying your income sources is an important role for the long term success. I’ve seen many beginners hitting the jackpot with an offer with only paid traffic sources, and didn’t know what to do when the offer was gone.

At my company, we focus on both paid and organic traffic sources, therefore SEO is an important part of our daily lives. Today, my goal was to create a simple guide for our new interns about how to write search engine friendly content, but I’ve decided to write a blog post about it, and share it with my readers also.

The tips about writing SE friendly content I’ll share will be exactly what my new staff will get as an initial guidance.

Writing Quality, Search Engine Friendly Content

We run a number of blogs, product review sites, comparison sites, quality content sites and more. So, this guide is intended to offer information about writing search engine friendly content in general. Whether you are writing a blog post or a product review, the general guidelines are the same. So, here we go;

1. Start with Market Research

Understanding your competition and the audience should be the first step. Start with a simple Google Search and see what others are doing first. You have to get a feeling of what others are saying about a topic before writing any content. Try to make this a habit and always start with a general market research. When you get more experienced, it will be a piece of cake to understand how much competition is out there for a given term, and you will start shaping your content and guesstimate what you can achieve before even writing the title.

2. Do the Keyword Research

For most writing jobs, using Google’s Keyword Tool is more than enough for general keyword research. I’m not going to get into the details of keyword research here, but you have to check both phrase match and exact match numbers, and also the number of competition on Google for the specific keywords. If the main keyword you are planning to target is too competitive, you might try to target a longer tail, and less competitive keyword phrase. After making a decision on your main keyword phrase, it’s time to plan your content.

3. Create an Outline for your Content

The success will come from choosing the right title and attention grabbing introduction. If you don’t have a catchy title, the chances are your readers won’t be interested in clicking on your link and read it. Even if they click and start reading, you have to grab their attention in your first few sentences. Outline your content, write short notes about how your introduction paragraph will start, what will be in the further details, will you use a list form, how you will conclude the article, will you be using any images or not, etc. If you don’t come up with a simple outline, it’s pretty easy to get lost while you are writing the actual piece.

4. Write your Content

I have written thousands of articles, blog posts, product reviews on hundreds of topics. Am I an expert author? Hell, no. English is not even my native language. But data shows me that quality always beats quantity in the long run. You should focus on offering value to your readers. Ask these questions to yourself; If you’ve read your own article, would it offer any value to you? Would you bookmark this site? Would you be checking related or more articles on the site? If your answer is yes, you are on the right track.

If you can combine quality with quantity, you will get more organic traffic. But don’t write long just for search engines. Write long content only if there’s value to offer in it. Longer content means higher chance of getting long tail keyword traffic.

In the old days, stuffing your keywords in title, meta tags, and in the actual content would do the work. But Google and other search engines are getting smarter every day. So, instead of keyword stuffing, focus on quality stuffing. I’m being asked the same question all the time; “What should be the keyword density in an article?” My answer is, I don’t know. I don’t remember when I’ve checked the keyword density of my content last time. Forget about keyword density. Use your target keyword, and all possible variables, even synonyms in your article when writing. When writing a product review, try to use the variations of the product name. So if the product name is “Dell Inspiron 1525″, try to use variations like “Dell Inspiron1525″, “Dell Inspiron-1525″, “Inspiron Dell 1525″, etc. in your actual content.

Writing complicated content won’t bring you the nobel prize. Keep it simple, clear and make is easy to understand for your target audience. Remember, when people search, they are not looking for academic level writing, they are looking for answers, information, easy to read content.

5. Proofread your Content

When you are done writing, if possible, have somebody else proofread your content. Other than checking the spelling and grammar errors, focus on the quality of the article. Does it sound overly complicated for the target audience? Does the introduction grab your attention?

The best way to proofread your own content is; write it, leave it for at least a few hours, and come back to proofread it before publishing it.

If you owned a similar website or blog, would you link to this content? If your honest answer is yes, you’ve done an excellent job.

These are the simple steps I personally follow when writing an article, a product review, or a blog post.

When you have quality content which brings high value to the target audience, it will be like wine. It will get more traffic while it ages. More sites will link to it, more people will use it as reference, and you will enjoy absolutely free, organic traffic for the lifetime of the content you’ve just created.

Whether you personally write content, or order it from writers, following these simple steps will help you succeed in writing quality content which will generate organic traffic in the long run.

You’ve probably heard the term; “Think outside the box!” many times in your life. You’ll probably ignore it next time you hear it, again. Maybe it will remind you a brand, or a cliche quote.

For a few minutes, forget about “Think outside the box” cliche, and let’s talk about some history.

The history of humanity is the witness to great inventors, warriors, empires, kings, scientists, and smartest people who have done something remarkable during their life time. These people left a remark to the humanity, not just lived an average life.

Yes, some of them are geniuses, and some just were luckier than their peers.

But, have you ever thought about the common characteristics of the greatest people in the world history?

Is it being the smartest? or being workaholics? or being great leaders?

The answer is; none of the above.

The correct answer is;

All the greatest people in human history were lateral thinkers.

Lateral Thinking is the Key Ingredient of Creativity

When I was at high school, I had an AP Calculus teacher who wasn’t very popular along the students. Instead of showing us how to solve a tough calculus problem, her main focus was to show as many possible different ways to solve the same problem.

At the calculus exams, whoever solved the problem with the most common way used along the others would fail even if the answer was correct, and you would only get a high score if you had the most unique way of solving the problem.

We were too young and inexperienced to understand the value of this approach, but did our best to come up with alternative methods to solve the exact same problem.

Can You Become a Great Lateral Thinker?

Lateral thinking is not like leadership. You don’t need to have the skills in your genes. You can keep practicing, and improve your lateral thinking skills.

The easiest way to start is with brainstorming. Try to come up with alternative ideas to the regular, daily and usual things you observe in your personal and business life.

You don’t need to start implementing these right away, but when you start to train your brain’s right side for alternative approaches in daily life, it will be easier to adopt lateral thinking culture in the long run.

How to Implement Lateral Thinking to Your Daily Life?

Most of your business & personal life relies on Problem Solving. Your goal should be to try to look at the daily problems from a different perspective. Just like my high school calculus teacher, try very hard to come up with alternative ways to solve the daily problems.

Since I’m in marketing, my lateral thinking examples are usually about marketing topics. Here are just a few ideas to get you started. Real life examples are always better than textbooks. So, here we go;

• How we’ve sold 13 times more coffee within 2 months

A few years ago when we were trying to sell more Turkish Coffee, we’ve faced a bottleneck in the marketing plan. There were only a limited number of people in the US who even heard about Turkish Coffee. The niche market was limited, and already dominated by us (and another competitor).

With a simple lateral thinking session, I’ve come up with a new marketing plan to target only “Espresso Drinkers”. Espresso market was much much larger than our market, and we were so sure that if an espresso lover tried Turkish Coffee, they’d love it and become a returning customer.

After running our marketing campaign for over 2 months, our Turkish Coffee sales have increased over 1200%. Yes, you’ve heard it right. We’ve sold 13 times more Turkish Coffee than we used to sell before wearing our lateral thinking cap.

This is just a simple lateral thinking example while you are approaching niche markets.

• Debt Consolidation Services Marketing Success

When I was new to affiliate marketing, one of the niches I’ve researched was “debt consolidation services”. There was so much competition in the niche, it was close to impossible to turn a profit with PPC traffic (for a beginner).

But, I knew so much about debt. While I was a student, I was in both credit card and school loan debt. I knew how to help people in debt with my real life experience.

Instead of trying to sell a debt consolidation service site, I’ve created a simple blog sharing my story. I’ve posted step by step how I’ve gotten out of debt with recommendations to services/products I’ve used. Such as books to change my financial mindset, a few digital products to get my finances organized, etc.

People loved my blog, and my organic traffic kept increasing every single day. With some simple lateral thinking, instead of diving into an uber competitive niche, I’ve come up with an alternative solution which mad me money while helped people to really get out of debt.

• Craigslist Marketing Example

I’ve written a pretty long post about my craigslist marketing example, so I won’t be rewriting about it here.

Feel free to read it to get another example of successful marketing idea due to lateral thinking.

Above are just 3 simple real life examples of lateral thinking from my personal experiences. I hope they will get you started with your own brainstorming.

Keep Following the Trends or Start Setting the Trends

Whether you have a local business, a 9 to 5 job, or simply trying to make money online, today is the day to make a decision:

Will you settle with the word; average in your business and personal life, keep following trends set by others, or will you start working on lateral thinking to make a change and start setting trends in whatever you do?

Further Reading Recommendations about Lateral Thinking

I’d love to hear your real life successful lateral thinking marketing examples. Please share at the comments section below. If you got stuck and need lateral thinking ideas, why don’t you also share them, and we can start some brainstorming and try to help.

Photo Credit: Holger Eileby