If you have known me for a while you have probably noticed a lot of improvements to the blog over the time its been online.

What you don’t see though is the the effects those changes have made.

Everything from getting more traffic, getting better search engine rankings, and yes even some affiliate sales.

Now its no way near as profitable as it could should be but it is getting there.

This blog would probably make a lot more and get a ton more traffic if I didn’t resist against all the information I was given by Mike Paetzold. He has been telling me for years everything I need to do to have a profitable blog up and running.

I always just blew it off as unnecessary work that wouldn’t be worth the time or effort.

Well it took me long enough but I have started implementing some of what he has been telling me to do. Turns out he was right all along ( yes Mike go ahead and say it , you told me so) ,and to top it off  it doesn’t take nearly as much time and effort as I had made myself picture.

It’s a common mistake that a lot of people make and one I normally talk about, but I was a victim of it too!

Over thinking and Over Complicating things. It’s so easy to start thinking of everything that needs to be done and everything that will need to get done that you can easily overwhelm yourself and convince yourself that its too much for you to take on.

Well there are a ton of old sayings that could apply here,

“You don’t have to see the whole stair case, just take the first step”
“whether you think you can or can’t you are right”

or one I often use is “How do you eat an elephant?” to which the answer is “one bite at a time”.

What it all boils down to is not overwhelming your self with everything that needs to be done. Yes its good to have a plan but the best plan in the world is useless unless some one actually follows it.

Luckily for me I didn’t have to do much planning since Mike Paetzold had already laid one out for me. He has told me exactly what I would need to do, but I just got hung up on all the details and staring at the elephant as a whole instead of whipping out my fork and knife and taking that first bite.

Luckily for you Mike has taken all that same information he has shared with me and created a bite by bite audio /video series that tells you exactly where to dig in and where all the best parts of that elephant are.

In his new audio/video course at Profitable Blog Steps Mike walks you through the exact steps to easily have your own profitable blog.

If You hurry you can grab an extremely discounted Price at

http://profitableblogsteps.com

One of the easiest and fastest way to make money online in through affiliate marketing. This is when you send visitors to someone else’s product sales page, they make the sale and deliver the product, and you get a percentage of the sale price as you commission (usually 50% or more for digital products).

The benefits of this are

1. You can get started almost immediately because you don’t have to create a product, write the sales page, design the website, develop marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
2. You have almost no investment of time because you don’t have to do the customer support or deal with billing or technical issues.
3. You have nearly zero risk because you already know the product sells. So if you send visitors you will get paid.

Looking at these benefits, it’s clear that affiliate marketing is the way to go!

The downside is…

After all your hard work of generating traffic to the sales page, you will never see any of those visitors again. Most of them will not buy on their first visit, which means you’re losing over 90% of the traffic right off the top. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.

What’s the solution?

Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you’re really on top of your game, you’ll then send to a pre-sales page in between.

Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

1. You’ll be building your own list of potential customers that you can market to again and again.
2. You’ll be pre-selling them by providing valuable information and then casually linking to the product sales page in the context of this information.

In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following affiliate marketing tools:

1. A Video Squeeze Page (with video)
2. One or more content-rich Pre-Selling Pages
3. At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

The video squeeze page is where you’ll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. It captures the name and email of your visitors and puts them into your autoresponder, which then begins sending out the 5-part email series. Then it redirects them to your pre-selling pages after they subscribe to your email series.

All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it’s well worth the effort of setting it up. And once it’s set up, it runs automatically – you just keep sending visitors to the squeeze page.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something like Affiliate Silver Bullet. Services like this design the enter system (the video, the video squeeze page, the email series, the content pages, etc). The benefit is that it’s much less expensive then you could do it yourself, and it’s instantly set up. The downside is that other people will be using the same affiliate tools as you. But the internet is pretty big, so this isn’t much of a concern.

The other route you can take is to hire people on Elance to create and implement the various aspects for you. Either way, it’s an important step that you need to take if you’re going to be serious about your business.

Affiliate Funnel has done it again. They launched as the downline builder for its members, not for the owners. They have done a great job of providing all the tools you need to build your own list, and build your own business.

It may seem strange that promoting another program would actually help you build your own business and not the owners but that is truly what they have accomplished, especially with their latest feature.

When I first heard the name of this feature it I was confused, but after it was explained to me I couldn’t believe what they were doing.

The feature is called “Jump Links” and my first thought was clickbanks Hop Links, but as you will see they are nothing like them.

You see when you promote most programs you are essentially building the program owners list for them, yeah you may earn commissions or whatever they offer for you helping to promote them, but in the end you just put someone new on their list.

Well since affiliate funnel is all about you promoting your business, when ever they send out a promotional email to their list your affiliate link will automatically “jump” into the emails of your referrals.

You don‘t have to worry about building someone else’s list anymore. No matter who sends the email out to your downline it will be your affiliate link in the email.

This shows just how serious they are at Affiliate Funnel about building your business and not theirs. That in combination with all the great tools and training they provide make for a winning formula, that I have not seen anywhere else.